Welcome to the third version of my site, the cleverly named, alifelski.com. Finally, after years of having disposable sites I am tapping into my eco-friendly side and making a site that down the road I will be able to, as Cameron Moll said, realign instead of redesign. I think the hardest thing about making a site for yourself is that there are even fewer restrictions. With a client you have to balance their wants and needs but when it is just you and your thoughts in front of a clean blank page in photoshop it can be intimidating. I believe it took me working through four other versions before feeling that I had a site that I was truly happy with. This is also the first version of alifelski.com that is built using CSS and HTML. Although most of my current job deals with working in Actionscript I felt that using web standards was more important for usability reasons and that I would simply use flash as icing instead of the dough that makes up the site.
This site has come a very long way from where it started back in 2004. My first attempt at making my personal site was for my last class in college, portfolio design. The class was in place to get graduating students ready for the outside world. Lets just say only offering three web design classes that focused on Dreamweaver, and Flash wasn’t exactly a rocketship to web design stardom. I actually believe after building the site in flash I didn’t figure out how to get it onto the internet for another year. FTP’s, domain names, and hosting space? I would always be a print designer and that I didn’t need to know any of those things right?
My second attempt was something that I quickly threw together after my favorite boss got fired from WPNI and my Senior Designer and I decided to leave the company as well. My experience with the web at this point was mainly based around Flash. If I did make anything that needed to have CSS markup my design was given to front-end developers who simply had more experience in that realm at that point in time. So in the end, the second version of my site ended up being very simple and basically just did what I needed it to do right at that moment.
Making this new site has been a fun and exiting process and I hope it will be able to grow along side me over the years. Let me know what you think. I am always interested in new opinions, ideas, and new forms of inspiration.
