

Tips for designing your personal site - kevinburke
http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/site-redesign/

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latch
In short, he turned his landing page into a summary, turning a blog (or, at
least the front page of the blog) into more of a profile page.

The home page remains clean, despite all the extra info. But to me, I don't
see a huge difference...Maybe I'm just against textured backgrounds (ughh,
it's horrible!).

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ineedtosleep
Indeed, the textured background is pretty useless. It adds nothing significant
to the visual presence of the site. All it does, at least on my monitors, is
make me go, "Wait...that's not a solid color."

Personally, I would've played around with some colors and patterns more:
making the headers darker and adding something in the background that would
complement well.

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kevinburke
Thanks for the feedback; I'm not __that __happy with it either. I just didn't
want plain white. I'll play around with some stuff this weekend.

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ineedtosleep
In addition to my comment (as I didn't expect you to reply), I apologize if it
came off a little /too/ straightforward. I just re-read my comment and felt
that it might be a huge kick in the nuts to some people, though it's usually
how I give feedback to myself and the designers I work with.

But anyway, good luck finding something you (and probably your users too :))
are happy with.

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rglover
His homepage reminds me of this quite a bit:
<http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/>

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kevinburke
Agreed, although his site is much prettier, and the post view pages look like
dave.is or zach holman's site. It's a coincidence we are both using Interstate
Condensed.

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dendory
Or you can take the hardcore approach, make your own CMS, your own SQLite
database, search system, comments system, sharing functions, etc.. from
scratch. On the plus side, I never have to install WP security updates! ;)

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somebear
But you do have to keep on top of whatever security holes there may be in your
own code, and fix whatever bugs pop up. Hopefully before a XSS vulnerability
is exploited.

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keithpeter
For a low traffic site that is updated a couple of times a month, how about
static pages with some scripting on the client machine? I use

    
    
        text files -> bash script calls markdown and adds header/footer -> another bash script generates indexes -> lftp syncs

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aseidl
Jekyll/Octopress+Git <http://octopress.org/>

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keithpeter
Thanks, I had seen Jekyll but this looks like Jekyll plus sensible defaults
for a website with all the bells and whistles. My personal site has no bells,
and I can't whistle too well. :-)

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aklemm
This site is solid and quickly gives a good idea of the who the owner is and
what he does. Love it. It would be great to combine this design concept and
personal information with the indie web experiments (syndicating and
aggregating your actions, microformatting the heck out of everything, etc)
<http://tantek.com/> advocates for on his personal page. Together, it's a good
model for the future of the personal web presence.

~~~
kevinburke
Funny you mention that site, it was one of the ones I used as an
inspiration...

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overcyn
Photo of yourself on the front page is just tacky.

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kevinburke
Can you give me some more feedback? Is it just _having_ a photo on the page
that's the problem or is it the photo itself?

I A/B tested a few photos on hotornot.com but I'm not sure that the photos
that tested best there would do the best on my own site.

~~~
overcyn
When I see a profile pic, especially in the top left, I immediately question
whether the author is interested in producing good content or just self-
promotion. And yes. The picture you chose is not the most flattering.

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calpaterson
This is a harsh comment but there is some truth in it (the photo itself is
nice!). I have to admit that I almost disregarded you as someone who is self-
promoting. I'm glad I didn't, because this article is good, but bear in mind
that other people might do. If it was me I might put a picture on the about
page.

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yllus
I like it. I've been dissatisfied with my personal website (
<http://yllus.com/> ) for a number of reasons, and you providing a child theme
that would let me quickly switch over it just the push I needed. Thanks!

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CMartucci
I'm not really a huge fan of his home page. I'd rather the content be on the
main page, that way you can easily skim through it.

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kevinburke
Thanks for the feedback. The problem with having all the posts there is that
it's difficult to order them in a way that makes sense. I argued against
reverse chronological order in the post.

Maybe you could show a list of post titles and short excerpts, and clicking on
any post expands the content in place.

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ThaddeusQuay2
If you work at Google, and on the Search Quality Team, no less, then shouldn't
your personal page be simply a search box, with maybe a tag cloud underneath,
and potentially hosted by Google App Engine or Google Sites? I'm not being
sarcastic. That's what I would do, if I worked there, and had lots of content
which I didn't want to continuously re-prioritize (based on who my visitors
were, or what I expected they would want to see at any given moment).

