In 2001 while I was working for Trisoft Systems I made a site for myself. One of my colleagues suggested a person I could contact for hosting and domain registration. I got navinharish.com and uploaded the site there. So far the site survived the way it was. I knew I had to change the site but it took me quite a long time to actually update the site with a new design.
One of the reasons that caused the delay is my belief that a change is not always an improvement. If something has to change, it has to improve as well. If we change something ourselves, it always look like an improvement, at least initially and this was a trap I had to avoid.
Before starting the redesign of the site, I sat down and asked myself what is good and what is bad about the site because this would help me decide in which direction should I be going.
Overall design
I was quite happy with the overall design of the site and it didn't look dated even six years after it was made. The bad thing with the design was that it was not flexible at all. The site was designed to look good without a scroll so it restricted the amount of text that could be fit in. The new design had to take care of this. The new design can accommodate as much content as you can pour in it without breaking down or starting to look ugly.
The design was so rigid that if I have to include new work in it, I would have to do a lot of work. Actually leave aside adding new work, if I had to change the sequence of the work in the folio, I would have to do a lot of work including creation of roll over images. The new design is a lot more flexible. The navigation on the right is a JavaScript include file. If I have to add new work, all I have to do is create a page for it and add a link in the JS file and I'm done. To make things simpler, the rollover in the folio is done through CSS instead of image replacement through JavaScript.
Accurate representation
The site is supposed to showcase my work; it should reflect my capabilities correctly. The old site featured the work from only interactive medium. In the new one I included the work from print and branding as well. I have also included some new work in the site as well.
Structure
I felt the need that the content of the site should be better structure but I was not able to figure out how exactly since I didn't have the entire content ready. I started with a lot of headers. Later I decided to first make a list of what all do I need on the site and once I had that ready, I tried to see what kind of structure would make sense. I finally decided to divide the content in three parts and those were the most important things in a folio site. The three heads are About, Resume and Folio. Once the content was divided in three broad categories, I divided it into smaller sub categories where required.
This is how I started with the structure initially. You can see a lot of them are completely unnecessary like the downloads section which would have been a liability as I would have to specially create some stuff for it.
The next big question was what should be on the index page. I didn't wanted to crows it with a lot of information as you usually see on most home pages. Those are just useless because in their attempt to say a few things about a lot of things, they don't say anything at all. For a while I thought about bringing the user directly to the folio because if I felt if someone is visiting the site of a designer, his or her work is what the visitor would be interested in most.
Finally I decided to do the way the home page is done now. I divided the screen in three parts with three colours that represent three broad content categories of the site. Although I have a bottom navigation that allows users to jump directly where they want the main navigation doesn't really allow you to do that. To emphasize that those three sections are further divided in the sub sections, I added a link to those subsections on the index page.
The file structure of the old site was a mess with all the files in the root folder. It was very difficult to make sense of what was where if I have to make a change. To simplify things, now all the content is saved in folder and subfolders that will make sense if I visit the site after an year to make some changes to it.
To me personally this redesign looks like an improvement, you tell me what do you think?
