Design and Implementation are the foundations for building this portfolio. Starting with how the site should look, be navigated and viewed. Moving on to putting this together in Hot Glue,overcoming any limitations.

I started with looking at other portfolio sites, seeing how other people had decided to display their work and themselves. Although this gave me ideas, from looking at branding, it seemed important that my site be my own.

Looking at navigation, i came to the conclusion that less is better. From personal experiance, if I cant find what I am looking for on a web page within a couple of clicks, I am out of there and looking at something else. To get these links in a sutible font they have been made as jpegs in photoshop and uploaded. I also wanted a clickable logo as so many sites have these nowadays, its frustrating when one doesn't

My next challange was how to make the navigation from the projects page clear and simple. To do this I decided picture links which flowed on to a seperate page, like this one, wewe best.

With all the design in place it was time to start building the portfolio. To do this I created a master page which had on it all the elements that would be the same throughout. These included the title, navigation and main content block. When these were copied across all pages, they were cloned and the original deleted. this prevented changes being made to all pages when something was altered on one.

It was also important to take into account different screen sizes when at this stage of building, so constant checks were made on different screens to verify that the visual impact was the same.

Next came a mind map of everything to do with the building of the portfolio, taking into account things like how it should look, what information should be displayed and the ease of use. This was a great tool in seeing what needed to be thought through and during that process the mapping was increased with yet more questions and points.

Also to be looked at was how to overcome the obsticles that Hot Glue thew up in the first site that was built and others that arrose during the building of this one.

Wireframes were drawn up, firstly on paper and then digitally. These helped to visualise how the finished site should look and try and iorn out any visable problems before it's too late.

These were done for the site as a whole and for the navigation as this is fundemental in the site working and being viewed correctly.

Size was something that needed implementing by way of image size as well as screens. Having many large images would make the page slow to load and therefore could put visitors off. It was decided that more smaller images would be best and be more descriptive too.
Finally, making sure that the branding comes across in the finished product, is vitally important. Fortunately by this stage as the portfolio has been well planned, there is little room for unexpected changes and branding issues.

The finished product, in my opinion is a well laid out, clear and simple design with colours and styling that convey my brand and personality.