When I began work on the third version of site in October of 2013, I decided I would take a lightweight and fastidious approach to the design and development. In the past, my website has been more of a storefront for my services, but it failed to tell my story. I think a website should not just be your portfolio, but rather storage of intellectual property: your ideas, your writing, your thoughts, and your memories. The internet is young compared to other methods of recording information, like books, but it will be around in some form for the rest of our lives. This website will serve the means —in a combination of ways— for me to achieve the end of recording information.
Design
Because my site has a very clear focus on intellectual content, I wanted the design to be simple. Every property in the stylesheet and every pixel on the screen is planned out and exectuted in the most proficient manner. This design may not have the charisma of some websites, but that is the intent. My design does not have character, but rather it is transparent; the content has character. I am not trying to tell a story though pixels. I plan to do that through words.
Typography
As if you were reading a book, typography to feel natural. For that reason, I went with a slightly off-white background and a light grey value for all text. Links are set in a light blue that flows with the "faded" shades of my color values. Only occasionally do I style type in other colors than grey. Most other typographic elements, such as horizontal rules, are also styled in a light grey. I do not use serif typefaces on my website, because even though the design does not necessarily have a distinct character, I feel sans-serifs are more suitable.
Front-End
My site is static and generated using Assemble a plugin for Grunt. I write content in either Handlebars (.hbs) or Markdown (.md). I publish my code on Github as an open-source, but contrary to many static sites, my site is not hosted with Github pages. Instead, I host my site on Amazon Web Services. With smart use of the Cloudfront CDN and S3, am easily able to load about seventy-five percent of the pages on my site in less than a second. I monitor the status of my website using Pingdom.