Crowes' Portfolio

[Crowes]

If you've ever taken the slightest bit of notice of my signature, it says that I'm a web developer. I definitely like to think that, that's for sure.

 

For about three years now, since I was about 16, I have enjoyed designing websites. People can call it untrue programming, or just label it "coding" to blanket the ease of learning  (especially with tools like Codecademy, which I used), but I like to believe there is a difference in being able to create a website and make it look nice. Now, with that in mind, I created many website designs over those three years that went from really, really, really shit - we're talking divs in a row on a page with text in - to what I have now, which is messing around with border properties over box-shadow to replicate 3D objects, creating my own site-specific version of bootstrap for my use alone to create (I call them "uniforms") to quickly create new pages (examples on BioTech Games' site).

 

Now, I want to create something for myself - something that I have an ideal image of and want to express myself through - something to show potential employers, customers, and friends and family. A porfolio - something that certain developers can make either way too flashy (and in turn tacky) or just really, really, really shit - literally there to display text but nothing more. I'm not about either of those things; I want to create a beautiful piece of art for everyone to see.

 

I'll be logging it through this thread as I go along so that people can recommend things, tell me better ways of doing things and more.

 

 

 

Part One:

[babadoctor]

Why do you want to think you can code! You can if you believe!

[Benji_w]

If you've ever taken the slightest bit of notice of my signature, it says that I'm a web developer. I definitely like to think that, that's for sure.

 

For about three years now, since I was about 16, I have enjoyed designing websites. People can call it untrue programming, or just label it "coding" to blanket the ease of learning  (especially with tools like Codecademy, which I used), but I like to believe there is a difference in being able to create a website and make it look nice. Now, with that in mind, I created many website designs over those three years that went from really, really, really shit - we're talking divs in a row on a page with text in - to what I have now, which is messing around with border properties over box-shadow to replicate 3D objects, creating my own site-specific version of bootstrap for my use alone to create (I call them "uniforms") to quickly create new pages (examples on BioTech Games' site).

 

Now, I want to create something for myself - something that I have an ideal image of and want to express myself through - something to show potential employers, customers, and friends and family. A porfolio - something that certain developers can make either way too flashy (and in turn tacky) or just really, really, really shit - literally there to display text but nothing more. I'm not about either of those things; I want to create a beautiful piece of art for everyone to see.

 

I'll be logging it through this thread as I go along so that people can recommend things, tell me better ways of doing things and more.

 

Look at the competition, see how they do it, how they present it, use behance to show off your work too and present both links when looking for a job. Have a printed portfolio and a digital version too, trust me.

[Crowes]

Made the navigation bar using html <header> and <nav> tags, with the logo and nav links in <a> tags. The navigation links also show up with a white square when you hover over them.

 

        <header>                    <nav>                <a href="#">                    <p>Crowes</p>                </a>            </nav>            <nav>                <!-- About -->                <a href="#">                    <p>< About /></p>                </a>                                <!-- Projects -->                <a href="#">                    <p>< Projects /></p>                </a>                                <!-- Blog -->                <a href="#">                    <p>< Blog /></p>                </a>                                <!-- Contact -->                <a href="#">                    <p>< Contact /></p>                </a>            </nav>

[Crowes]

This was next!

 

<div id="banner">   <p>I'm Josh Crowe.</p>   <p>I'm a Web Developer.</p>                     <button>You're who?</button>   <button>You're a what?</button></div>

[Crowes]

I'm back at it again.

 

First, I went about redesigning my own website. It's going to be a work in progress, but I love how pretty I managed to make it.

 

Then, I went about redesigning Realtek's website, as a means to test out pure HTML/CSS drop-down menus.

 

(Current Version of their site)

Spoiler

 

(My version)

Spoiler

( http://www.projects.crowes.co/realtek/ )

 

 

 

[Cruorzy]

Realtek has a ugly website, you did a great job packard bell website would be something that could use improvement too.

Wish i had such enthusiasm in designing, would improve atleast every project i am working on.

 

 

[Gachr]

It looks really nice, especially that you take things from scratch. Perhaps you could write to Realtek about it tho I'm on a pretty small screen and the buttons appear HUGE here.

[Nineshadow]

Good job. If you truly like web design, then keep doing it. It's your choice.

I,myself, don't really like it. I am competent and I can make sites both look good and be functional, it's just not my thing. I've never been the designer type tbh. I like "real programming" though. Complex problems with nice solutions. Awesome algorithms. All of that sort. I've just done a wonderfully complex problem. You are given M conditions of the form (x | y) and you needed to find a maximum variable for which all of the conditions were true. Of course, the solution involves doing a binary search for the maximum value, then a 2SAT problem for the actual conditions themselves, which then involves strongly connected components in a graph, and the best algorithm for doing it involves DFS. But the problem had certain proprieties and the solution could be optimized further using certain observations and techniques to solve the issues posed by those observations ( interval trees and/or division in sqrt(N) pieces).

[Brenz]

You have made a good start but be careful of falling in to the trap where all your websites are essentially the same.

 

All the ones you have shared here are basically identical with varying colours and images. You also need to be careful with your assets, some of the images I have seen are way too big for their use and therefore take a long time to load, crop images to the size needed, use sprites to lower the number of http requests and reduce loading times and optimise them for web usage.

[Crowes]

13 hours ago, Gachr said:

It looks really nice, especially that you take things from scratch. tho I'm on a pretty small screen and the buttons appear HUGE here.

Yeah, I admit they appear big everywhere. I may have to play around with the margins of that logo and have the buttons size the whole navigation bar for different screen sizes, but I'll probably end up doing that on another (re)design of something else.

 

 

13 hours ago, Gachr said:

Perhaps you could write to Realtek about it 

I usually do that with all redesigns (write to the original's creator), but I doubt the contact information on that site is anything but up to date.

 

 

3 hours ago, Brenz said:

You have made a good start but be careful of falling in to the trap where all your websites are essentially the same.

I started noticing that a lot with my old redesigns, so I'm pretty much wiping the slate and only redesigning when I have (a) a new layout and (b) something I haven't tried before - in the case of realtek, this was the pure HTML/CSS drop-downs.

 

 

3 hours ago, Brenz said:

All the ones you have shared here are basically identical with varying colours and images. You also need to be careful with your assets, some of the images I have seen are way too big for their use and therefore take a long time to load, crop images to the size needed, use sprites to lower the number of http requests and reduce loading times and optimise them for web usage.

This is a strong point. At first I'd imagined the browser just compressed the image to the resolution post-resize, but apparently that's not how it works. Going to have to remember to always crop them down appropriately/respectively before upload.

[Crowes]

I made my first slide-in menu. Pure HTML5/CSS3/JS.