So to design a new website, I need to come up with a theme. I feel that websites need to show exactly what their about by just the visuals it portrays, you wouldn’t have a mobile phone website designed like a cheese production companies website, would you?

Portfolio websites and blogs I have found to be the hardest to design for. On one hand you need to show that your are human, you have a personality and talent and on the other you need to be professional and clean with the design. No one wants to say they done their own design when it’s sloppy, not good to navigate and full of bugs or problems. The latter is coding mainly, unless you put the design together in such a way things over lap, images are to large or the likes. This is where a good grasp of the platform your creating for comes in. As an example, a normal website design is just, in it’s simplest form, a HTML page. You can add whatever you like yourself like headers, sidebars and the likes, but the basics is a page. With Wordpress, you have your header, sidebar, footer and contents area. So when it comes to designing the layout either in sketch, Photoshop mock up or just working at it, you have to work around them 4 boxes. At least that’s what I found.

SO, what makes designing layouts hard for me (being lacking in hardcore coding experience) is coming up with a layout which flows consistently no matter how big, or long should I say, the page will become. (Not every post you make will be the same size.) The easiest way then is to just leave the middle blank, which, seems to be the norm. Then link the top and bottom in whatever way you can make fit. Solid colours seem to work best, at least it’s the best way I’ve found to make things fit. Repeating patterns do work exceptionally well, but can be challenging to find something that’s evenly repeatable, and fits the whole design.

So, as of now. I have a couple ideas, but their all in my head. I need to find some paper and a pen and start doodling.

Adios amigos!