J. Pedro Ribeiro

So... I Finally Redesigned My Site

January 13, 2012

Website, Redesigned

Nearly 4 years ago, back in 2008, I decided to create a blog and write about all the stuff I was reading and doing, mostly web related. Took me a while to learn Wordpress, how to create a brand new theme and customise it. It went ok, and I got nice feedback. But time passes by, people change and so must this site.

Design

On the first version I was very into textures and retro feeling. I kind of overdid it to my current taste. So in this new theme I decided to go minimal: subtle texture in the background, little graphics (mostly icons) and kept the dark colour scheme.

Content

As you can see, this site is heavily focused on the blog entries. Portfolio, about me and everything else is secondary. Comments are off. I realised that only 5-10% of comments were meaningful and from those, about half were actually interesting comments to the post. Also, most people would contact me via Twitter anyway so I saw no reason to keep it.

Development

Even though the design is minimal, the coding is quite complex. On the front-end side, I used HTML5 markup mostly, with some CSS3 techniques for visual richness and a bit of jQuery. The back-end is, clearly Wordpress, so I made use of the new features available at version 3+ like Custom Menus, Custom Fields, Featured Images, and so on. I learned A LOT about Wordpress during this stage.

And It's Here!

Took me a while to finish it, I'd say about three months on and off since I could only work on it weekends and some free nights. Anyway, hope you like this new version. If you have any question about techniques, codes, plugins, or anything used in this site just drop me a tweet or e-mail. Cheers!


J. Pedro Ribeiro

Hello!
I’m a Brazilian frontend developer living in London. This website features some of my latest projects and my thoughts on anything web related.
You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Wanna talk? Send me a message.