My Portfolio. Work is happening!

Well, over the past week, week and a half, I have been working on the portfolio section. As you may have noticed, I have dropped the home section. This was for quite a few reasons, let me explain:

When build my portfolio, I planned the whole thing out using these questions:

1. What story is the site trying to tell?
2. What will my viewers what to see at the site?
3. What content does the site need, to fulfill these questions?

So, now you know the bare minim of my design process, here are the answers I came up with:

1. I am trying to tell the story of how much I love what I do.
2. My viewers want to see my work, and what makes me, me :).
3. The content that is needed, is my work, and something to tell the users who I am?

So there you go. Now you can see that there was no need for a home section. What useful information could I of displayed on it? My latest project, but why? For this, they can just visit my portfolio? A quick description about me? Why not read the full thing over at my about section? You may be thinking that all this could of been place in a home section just for ease of use, maybe to get the user interested in what the site has to offer. This is not relevant for a portfolio. If it was a news site, or a company site, then yes, this could be used to get the end user interested in what the site has to offer. For a portfolio, the chances are, the user has come to this site to view my work, or to read about me? So they are not going to need additional work into making them view my portfolio, or read about me.

Another question here is, well what else would make then interested into view my work? The site it’s self. If you place the user into an engaging and satisfying experience, they will want to carry on and view the rest. This is basically my design process for a site!

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So that is the design side of things over with, now lets get onto what I have done so far. Well,

1. 1. Have almost finished the main menu (Just a few things I’m not quite sure about…).
2. 2. Set up the external SWF loading, and all the stuff needed to load the appropriate sections in. The text you see when you click on the portfolio section and about is all in an external SWF.
3. 3. I am working on the portfolio sections. For early previews keep checking the beta link, as I will be uploading them soon.
4. 4. I have started sorting out all the database stuff, etc. This is all going to be loaded using AMFPHP/MySQL/PHP.

So there you have it , a very in-depth look into my portfolio!

Harry.