

Ask HN: How can I improve my personal website - michael_fine

I'm a high school student developer looking for an internship. What can I do to improve my flow. What am I missing in terms of design? Writing?<p>The site is michaelfine.me
======
EnderMB
I expected far, far worse. In all honesty, I know plenty battle-hardened,
professional contractors that don't have personal sites this good.

The only issues I can point out is some HTML validation errors, mainly with
header tags that don't match. I'd also rework the skills section to line up
with the experience section.

The best advice I can give to you is to seek out some digital agencies and to
send their Managing Directors or Creative Directors a quick email to run
through who you are and whether they would be able to take you on board for a
few projects. It's hard to get into some companies, but agencies tend t eat
this kind of stuff up and they'd love to be able to give a young developer a
chance to work on a real-world client. This will give you the only thing I
feel is lacking with your site, and that is some real-world projects.

------
apricot13
Its a good looking site, a few comments.

* The ruby icon doesn't match the rest

* the blue h1's are a little 2d. Try a webfont or a background image, use dribbble for inspiration: [http://dribbble.com/shots/668114-Web-search-user-interface?l...](http://dribbble.com/shots/668114-Web-search-user-interface?list=searches&tag=titles)

* I didn't even notice the navigation at the top. Same issue with the title font in the nav. Also there's more padding below the title than above.

* For the little squares under skills maybe you could put together something using a javascript graph library? Add something interactive to the page that also shows off your skills.

* You lose the page nav when you go to resume

* theres no need for projects to have its own page yet. You could move the projects to the home page and use anchor links in the nav,

* Perhaps you can add more to the header. "I'm X, I do this that the other I can do this for you I have worked here. These are my clients" You're work should stand out more than a 1 line introduction.

* You should definitely put a link to your github page on the front page.

* Might be worth commenting your CSS/HTML, my first thought is to always look to see if a developer is a good commenter!

Hope there's something helpful in there! I tend to go on a bit, especially
when there's mismatched padding!

------
michael_fine
Clickable: <http://michaelfine.me>

------
bendecoste
Nice website, some visual suggestions:

1\. Your name isn't centered vertically

2\. You need some white space between your subcategory headers and the content
itself, between java [x] [x] [ ] [ ] [ ] and Frameworks/Libraries (know what I
mean?)

3\. Jquery is usually written jQuery.

4\. I think the centering is kind of weird, the content being centered looks
good, but I think your headers should maybe be left-aligned. (same with your
experience descriptions)

5\. I think your contact me button is, maybe take a look at glyphicons
(<http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/base-css.html#icons>)

Having more information than what you rate yourself out of 5 on a specific
piece of tech might be good, I am not sure how you are planing to use this
website as a resume or not, though, so may be irrelevant. Also not sure how
you might incorporate that into your current design.

Other than that it looks good, good luck!

------
rakeshsharmak
Hi Michael, This is great work! Just a couple of quick notes: 1\. You should
consider shortening the scrolling length of the page. Maybe you can get rid of
the logos (or resize them) and also get rid of the blank space. 2\. Your
homepage should give provide an immediate reference point to hiring
professionals. As such, try to include more detailed information about
yourself and your projects on that project. For example, "I am a developer" is
a pretty generic statement (plus, it occupies way too much real estate on the
page). Instead, you can add references to your projects and languages. 3\.
Adding your proficiency in each language is a great idea. However, you can
better display this proficiency through projects and your Github code....It
might be an idea to add more details about your projects, including the front-
end for HR professionals to look at... Hope this helps...Good luck!

------
stevoo
Hi ,

First thing i noticed and i always do hate this things is how good you are in
some languages. Unfortunately that means nothing as you cant really tell me
you are an expert in Ruby (4/5) Id recommend removing that and adding some
concrete data why you are good at those. Perhaps the projects you have
actually done.

Also the Ruby is not really the same as the other icons.

Some more tags in html would be good etc <meta property='og:locale'
content='en_US'/> <meta property='og:title' content=''/> <meta
property='og:description' content=''/> <meta property='og:url' content=''/>
<meta property='og:site_name' content=''/> <meta property='og:type'
content='website'/> ...

------
xauronx
Looks pretty awesome. You got a lot of good feedback already but here's a
couple things:

\- The resume page is the only page without navigation.

\- Maybe I just like footers, but... there's no footer. Not really "wrong"
but, I expect it to be there.

\- The header shifts a few pixels when you go from About back to the index.

\- Personally, I prefer to see technical skills broken up on the resume like
on your My Skills section. That is to say, have languages, tools, IDEs, split
up. Not sure what industry standards there are though.

\- If you get bored, throw some URL rewriting in to get rid of the .html on
the pages, just for fun.

All in all, much better than most personal websites I see.

------
jezclaremurugan
Hi Michael, your website is pretty neat, but I'd suggest you to put the
projects on the first page, and your "experience" below that. You might want
to check out Google Summer of Code, though I'm not sure of the dates.

~~~
slast
agreed, definitely swap those two pages. your personal projects are much more
important than your own assessment of your skills

------
professorTuring
Although is pretty neat, let me point out some minor fixes-enhancements (I'm
using FF).

\- The ruby logo doesn't get along with the others, try adding some gray to
the carats or something alike.

\- You are not using the same gray combination in the JS logo.

\- The contact me button needs more space for the envelope.

\- The resume page doesn't show the header.

Nevertheless, great work =)

------
booruguru
Neato!

It's clean and minimalist. I like it. But on the homepage, under "My
Experience" the chunks of text look a little awkward. Try align left or
justify (instead of "center") also, try consider using helvetica neue and
other light fonts for some of your text. Otherwise, it looks very
professional.

P.S. Have you considered freelancing via sites like Guru.com and eLance?

------
yefim323
Looks pretty bad on mobile (<http://i.imgur.com/LVhn8uz.png>).

------
grumps
In general I think you've don't better than most your age and most developers.
I still ask the question "So what?" Meaning - what's better about you than
your neighbor?

------
pclark
This was a thousand times better than I expected. great job.

------
devonbarrett
The plural form of paradigm is paradigms. Nice job!

