Of course, many comments explained how they couldn’t use modern technology on their site because of their visitors — who where still using old browsers — and therefore decided to wait and catch up on it when their statistics changed.

So, how could you keep your site accessible for everyone and still try out new techniques?

There are probably many answers to this, but one that should be obvious is to simply start a new site. If you allready have a portfolio or a company site that you can’t experiment on, then I suggest starting up a blog or simply just a playground where you can go cray and report your experience at the same time.

In my case, I happen to be so lucky that most of my visitors are browsing my portfolio with a modern browser. And the ones wo aren’t are probably not that into the web to appriciate my work anyway.

This probably means that I won’t be attending the Digital Media programme this fall. I’ll probably spend the next couple of days contemplating and recharging, and then return with full force.

A huge thank you to all the new people I got to meet during the two rectruitment days, and congratulations to all of you who got accepted. Good luck and have a blast!

I will, however, continue to spawn ideas and develop projects with my personal developer-guru Richard (www.paralyzed.se) and we’ll keep you posted as soon as we’ve got something to show.

Now it’s time to recover and recharge. See you soon.

Update: Seems like Web Design Ledger made a post containing a link here, along with Design Fridge (who misspelled the name of my site) Corrected!.

Update 2: A new addition is Matthew Smith’s Pattern Tap. That’s an awesome collection of inspiration.

Do cool free stuff that doesn’t make you any money. It will really grow your brand and get you clients.

— Jeffrey Zeldman in .NET (.pdf) via Max Voltar.

The eight version of my portfolio is done and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve really pushed myself to the limit regarding every single detail of this project, and it’s been a pleasant trip. Mostly.

…Web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the web.

— Wikipedia on Semantic Web

This is the core of what I think is important on the web — Accessability. I, however, think that simplicity builds to finding content on a website.

I realized that I’ve been overlooking so many details with my previous designs, and I tried to see this as a normal project and really get the best out of it. I’m proud to say that I’m finally done.

Why redesign?

There’s so many answers to this that I don’t even know where to begin. First, the old portfolio section was a pain to add projects to. Now, it’s just as easy as posting an entry in the blog. Without actually doing it… Kinda.

Secondly, I wanted a real blog. Not just the latest-entry-thing that was harder to navigate than the IRS. These are the two main points, even though I was very tired of the design and wanted to improve it while still keeping the same feeling of simplicity, minimalism and typography.

The changes

Every section has been updated and tweaked a bit. I wanted a tumblr-ish kind of blog, with various categories in it. But the most important thing was to go through the portfolio and make it more accessible and easier to look through. I am however not done with adding my past work, I’ll do that in due time.

I deleted much of the older work that no longer feels like what I’m doing today or even want to be doing in the future. It was simply too old and doesn’t represent my way of working today, even of some of them had kick-ass design.

Technology

I’m proud to say that I for the first time implemented CSS 3, so I recommend you to change to a modern browser to fully enjoy these details and be up to par with future technology online.

Another thing I was trying out was the Custom fields which I know I’m very late experiencing the benefits of.

Other than that, it’s just handcrafted XHTML and CSS. Still using WordPress and a list of plugins that I might share in the near future.

I’m going to post more in-depth blog posts about the tweaks and technology I’ve used to accomplish this. It’s nothing advanced and I’m sure everyone could pick up on this.

I stated before that I want more of a tumble blog with the abillity to add articles, quick link entries, announcements and more options if/when I want them.

I contemplated changing from WordPress to another CMS or blogging platform that meets my requirements. But I’ve come to realize that all my needs where actually met in WordPress, with some minor tweaking.

Using both categories and tags to file entries has never made much sense to me. So instead of using costum fields or more advanced changes, I simply use the categories to identify what type of post I want to add, e.g: Link, Article, Portfolio work, Photography etc. and then use the tags to tag whatever content the entry holds.

The portfolio category is excluded from the blog, and only posted under the portfolio section, bringing alot of extra funcionallity to the portfolio (Permalinks, comment function, tags and the abillity to write more in-depth about every project).

My opinion is that this solution is better than creating a custom field for the posts, because a) I’m not using the tag function today, and b) less tweaking = more fun.