“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.”

- Isaac Bashevis Singer

This explains my situation to a tee, as I am sure it does for many other designers.  Over the last 2 years I have gone through theme, after theme, after flipping theme for giblette.com and to no avail.  I was never fully satisfied while the end result.  Half of the issue was my process, which if only one good thing has come from my dissatisfaction with my personal site it’s that I’ve had the opportunity to refine my design process, which has helped me to deliver a more solid product to my clients.  The other half has to do with not really knowing what I want from my personal site. Is it a blog?  Is it a portfolio showcase?  Is it both?  Is it more?  Etc…

Finally after two years I feel that my process has been well refined and that my personal goals are understood enough that I was able to layout the overview of what giblette.com should be.  Really in the end it’s everything that I have been doing for the past few years.  It’s a playground… my playground.  The wonderful thing about having a personal website should be the freedom you receive in being able to try new ideas and express who you are. Instead of trying to develop a master theme that focused on “this or that”, what I really needed was something simple and to the point. I feel the new layout accomplishes this.  It is simple and flexible enough for future growth, as I am sure I will continue to have new ideas.  I have set up three main areas that should contain everything I want this site to accomplish.  So here is a quick outline of what this site will entail:

my Work

This is a big thing for every designer but I wanted a place where I could easily add new projects within just a few minutes of backend time and allow people to see the various types of work I am involved in.  Building a few custom fields in my WordPress theme has accomplished the speed of project entry and also incorporating an ajax based gallery I am able to quickly showcase different types of work that’s organized by work type.

the Blog

This is pretty self explanatory, it’s a blog.  The topics I hope to cover more about here are helpful tips & tricks, tutorials and information about my experiences as a designer/web developer.

my Projects

Just as I tend to get a million ideas rushing through my head about this site, I always seem to get ideas about other side projects that I feel are worthy of future development. Well over the past year a few of these ideas have actually gone into development. Yay!  And a few are currently in beta almost ready for a public release. So in this section I will be giving overviews of my side projects (ie project purpose, version details, release dates, etc.).

Overall I am very pleased to finally have the site up to par and at a level I personally am happy with.  I am actually loving the lighter, brighter version of giblette.com.  For so long I have had dark themes and honestly I am not sure if that had anything to do with me not being completely satisfied or not but I do know one thing… I do prefer reading content on a lighter background.  I hated even proof reading my own articles in the previous dark themes.

Also, I have received this question a few times already so I’ll just answer it here. “Why orange?” – Well as I stated above, your personal website should really be an expression of who you are and what you’re about.  For me, life is really good right now… to quote the Frank Sinatra, “Orange is the happiest color”, and right now I have everything to be happy about.