I’ve wanted to get this site back up and running for a few years now. It’s taken this long because I honestly wasn’t sure what the purpose of a new website would be, or if I even needed one at all.
A little history lesson
The previous version of this website first appeared around the beginning of 2007, right after I graduated from college. The whole purpose of the website was to showcase my graphic design work, try to land a few freelancing gigs and blog about graphic and web design.
The website achieved all of those things, but it was quite obvious that the blog was an afterthought. I probably wrote about a dozen articles or so, none of which were spectacular or really said anything unique. The problem, was that I had originally decided to start blogging because a lot of other web designers were at the time. What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t contributing anything useful to the web and was just creating noise where it wasn’t needed.
I ended up taking the site down in early 2009 when I was hired by Barking Dog Studios as a front-end designer. The blog had been neglected for quite a while and the rest of the site wouldn’t be needed anymore, so I replaced it with a “coming soon” page (which was actually still online up until a few weeks ago).
Starting over
When I first started redesigning, I was too caught up with what the rest of the web was doing. I was adding features I didn’t need, trying to go after a certain “look” and using shiny new technologies just because they were available. I went through a number of designs and even got to the coding stage a few times before completely scrapping them.
It took me a while to realize that all of that stuff didn’t matter to me. I wanted my website to be a place where I could write about the things I love and share things that interest me with like-minded people.
Once I knew what the purpose of the website would be, it wasn’t so hard coming up with an appropriate design for it. It’s far from perfect but I’m quite happy with the result so far.
So, what now?
First things first – no promises. I’m not going to tell you that I’ll write a certain number of entries per month or anything like that. I’ll write when I have something to say. It could be an idea, a review, a suggestion or even a frustration (hopefully not too often). I imagine that most of it will be web or technology-related, but don’t hold me to it.
Also, this website is very much a work in progress. I wanted to launch it as soon as possible so that I could start writing, but that also meant I had to leave some things behind (for now at least). This included a fluid grid layout and also support for media queries so that the site will be more usable. Hopefully those features will be added back in the near future.
Also, this site will never have comments, but if you ever have questions or thoughts you can reach me on Twitter @matthalliday.
Thanks for reading.
