Striking the Right Balance

Waiting over 10 years to put up my first personal website seems a bit of an oversight. It's something I've struggled with for a number of years for a number of reasons. I'm 33 years old this year and have felt for a year or so that my career has stalled a little or rather my current position as an in-house graphic artist isn't giving me enough opportunity to flex my creative imagination.

Infrequent Freelance work, the mistress to my steady fulltime employment, keeps me on my toes and offers the opportunity to experiment and work on different projects. There's an obvious financial motivation to taking on freelance work and I guess I'm teetering on the brink between the freedom of freelance and the security of full-time work. But throw a baby into the mix and you find you're trying to strike a balance which allows you to be a good parent and one who'll put food on the table.

So this is the position I found myself in at the start of the year and I then decided to crank up the stress machine and throw an additional site development, my first portfolio site in there to spice things up.

I began by buying my domain and hosting and had decided early on that I would go down the WordPress route and I was going to develop my own theme etc. In one night I designed all of my pages and then the following night I did the conversion to HTML and CSS. This was all done in the space of 6-8hrs and followed some frenzied sketching and not taking on all the features and pages I wanted.

Next step was to turn this HTML/CSS into a working template for WP. I'd done this before several times but I'm not a developer and coding templates doesn't come naturally to me - it's something I need to work at and spend time on. Time was the one thing I didn't have on my 2 weeks paternity leave and my neat HTML pages and beautifully crafted CSS files lay dormant while I burped, walked and fed my daughter Annabelle with my wife Emily.

Annabelle was 2 months old when I decided to use a bought template. The plan was to source a template close to what I was looking for and then customise it with a child theme. ThemeForest is a great resource for this with some very cool themes which can do amazing things and I opted for the Alabastros theme by Mexican designer Manuel Cervantes.

This was a bit of a blow for me, I really wanted the site build to be my own but using this brilliant theme as a starting point put my site development back on track. Or at least it was supposed to. I found that altering someone else's theme was fast becoming more work than starting from scratch.

All the while I've got this little voice in the back of my mind telling me that the content and not the site build itself was what was really important. Little voices in your head are not dissimilar to a nagging wife (no offense Emily) - you can only zone them out for so long before you cave and pay attention!

A timely issue of Computer Arts Projects landed on the matt, it was a special issue on Portfolios and there was a really good feature on getting exposure on-line which outlined different web sites and services for hosting your folio.

I had heard of and visited the squarespace site before but was put off by the hosted service as I thought I would need the control of being able to tinker under the bonnet of my site. It seemed more expensive but when I sat down and ran some figures it was about the same cost and when I did a bit of soul searching and jotted down the pros and cons I decided to cut the crap and go with Squarespace. For a number of very simple reasons...

For one, I'm not skilled enough in the techy side of hosting web sites to 'tinker under the bonnet', I know enough but it's not interesting to me and I don't want to cross the Rubicon and become a full-on web developer. The control I thought I wanted was one of the things hindering my site development and I was constantly FTP'ing files and refreshing my browser, then checking half a dozen other browsers and stressing over what IE6 was doing to my pages!

Secondly, as I mentioned above I don't want to be a full on web developer. I've worked with guys who have got loads of skill in development techniques and they invest a lot of time in learning those skills but it's a different mindset. For me this would be a painful transition to make which would then weaken the skills I have in 3D and illustration. I'm happy enough with the label 'Front End developer' and see web design as something I'm involved in at a concept level through to coding pages in HTML/CSS but then I'm happy to hand over to a real developer who will work their magic.

Ultimately squarespace gave me the freedom to concentrate on the aesthetics and page structure of my site and the nuts and bolts of how it all works are now someone else's problem.

I took out those original HTML pages and within a few hours I had re-created the original layouts I wanted. As I write this first article for my new Design Blog and porfolio site I'm about 2 weeks away from going live. Woop-woop!!

Juggling fulltime work, freelancing and endulging yourself in some shameless self-promotion while still finding the time to be a good husband and dad is all about compromise. Concentrate on the things you're good at and if there's a service out there which will support you in reaching your goals then use it, the time you'll save can be spent on more important things like feeding your daughter or brushing her new teeth for the first time.

10 years is too long to wait to launch a portfolio website but better late than never and I'm excited to see where it will lead.