As mentioned in my earlier Tweet, I’ve begun streamlining my sites to make them more functional instead of just being yet another outlet for my thoughts (we’ve got social networking sites for that).
First thing on the list was to replace my Sweetcron Lifestream with a single page portfolio. The reason behind this is simple: when people go to my website, they would expect to see information about me and not a stream of all of my social networking site activity.
As to the design of the page, I only had two main points to keep in mind:
- It has to immediately convey “I’m Bryan Bibat, software engineer. Here are my works, and if you want to hire me, contact me here.” Anything more than that would make my site less useful.
- It has to reflect my identity.
The identity part is a bit tricky, though I could summarize it as “simple, yet subtle”. As you can see from the redesigned bryanbibat.com, everything is simple. No flashy graphics, just a clean one-page HTML site. The subtle part is the inclusion of jQuery for the scrolling and the lightbox — both unexpected features.
I think the more subtle (or should I say, more “bry” :P) part of the whole redesign is the “mirror” gimmick. The image above would spoil you already but anyway, here’s the gimmick: visit both bryanbibat.com and (my newly rented site) bryanbibat.net.
Yup, each is an opposite version of the other. The symbolism behind that, I leave to the reader. Heck, I might just be screwing around with the visitors and there might not even be a deeper meaning behind it. :D
The fun part? The HTML code for both sites are exactly the same.
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That’s pretty much the biggest change that I’m going to do for this streamlining thing. The other stuff is mostly invisible to my network anyway.
