One Small Step

Last night I started working on a new project -- not for a client, but for me. After nearly four years in its current state, the time has come to tear down my portfolio site, and potentially a whole lot more.

I've been a bad parent. Dominey Design hasn't been updated in almost two years, due to my day to day workload, the attention this site (What Do I Know) has taken away from it, and the unfortunate fact that it takes too damn long to update. Adding a project to the "Factory" section requires all kinds of graphical assets and textual content. Plus, the ActionScript running the site is all Flash 5, which at the time of the site's creation was a huge upgrade from the awful slash-notation of Flash 4, but today is antiquated and difficult to work with. And to top it all off, I'm simply tired of it. Dominey Design was a lot of fun to create, and made quite an impact on my bottom line, but it's time to let it go.

And then there's the site you're looking at -- What Do I Know -- which for better or worse has become my portfolio. It's the site nearly everyone contacts me through, due to (I believe) the more personal tone and up-to-date content. What Do I Know was launched at nearly the same time as Dominey Design, and was never intended to be my business presence on the web. But times have clearly changed.

So the question is, what now? What Do I Know has stuck to this current design for nearly three years. I feel that it has held up remarkably well, and truth be told I'm still quite happy with both the layout and overall style. But it too doesn't serve my current needs all that well. So the next step, I believe, is to merge both sites into a single, cohesive online presence that's professional, yet personal. Graphically rich, yet readable. Self-promotional, yet restrained. Blog-like, but not appear like one.

I'm also considering consolidating the domains into something like "todddominey.com" to start anew, or ditching the title "What Do I Know" all together and placing everything under Dominey Design. Or, I could use one of my other domains like chickenbiscuit.com. Mmm...nevermind.

And then there is the architecture -- do I use Flash again for my portfolio? If so, what steps can I take to make it easier to update? If not, can CSS/XHTML do just as good a job -- if not better? And for that matter, what CMS would I use? Truth is I'm burned out on MovableType. I never upgraded to 3.0, and don't intend to. The best contender for replacement right now is Textpattern (I really like its lightweight footprint, community, and the fact that I'd be helping feed a developer with two photogenic dogs in the French countryside), but that won't be a reality until XML-RPC support is added (I'm terribly addicted to MarsEdit). [Update: Check out this beta plug-in to add XML-RPC support to Textpattern until it (hopefully) becomes native]

And what about color? Typography? Concept (if any)? There's nothing as intimidating to me as opening a new document in Illustrator and staring at that vacant, empty stage. For me it takes at least a few stabs to get a groove going, but once I'm in there, I'm there, and it reminds me why I love doing what I do.

So last night I cautiously opened an empty Illustrator document (I use it for all my conceptual work), and started doing what I did back in 2001 -- screwing around. I experimented with a few of typefaces I've purchased by haven't used, pushed blocks of content around, and resisted the urge to think about details. And before I knew it, five hours had completely disappeared. I'm on my way.