When I first began planning my website, I had the idea that it was going to cover multiple subjects that interest me. At first I had intended to have multiple sections- The first section was supposed to be an art gallery to display some of the art I have created over my time in college. The second was to be a kind of computer geek repository of information, where I would discuss my thoughts on the benefits and limitations of computer hardware, and be sort of a “buyers guide” to building a computer system from scratch. Lastly, it was going to have a blog that had no particular focus other than to provide information and links to things that I found cool. As time moved forward I realized that this was perhaps too broad in its focus and would be too ambitious to complete and actively maintain. In the end I decided to go with a gallery for the reasons that I haven’t put any artwork on display in a public realm since the website I made when I was a teenager other than some high school and college galleries, and also because very much of my artwork has been damaged over the years, and scanning them and posting them would be a way to immortalize them. At the present time the intended audience is mostly people I know that would care to look at my art, but as my skill and portfolio grow it could eventually act as a supplement to my resume when I start my career.
My design is pretty minimalistic. That could change, but right now I see no reason to have a busy complex design for a relatively small website that is already focused on displaying art.
I originally tried to get the domain fingerprints.com(.net etc.), which was a bit too optimistic seeing as how I just got security companies regarding fingerprint recognition hardware, and a few variations had been squatted by greedy developers. As I explained in an earlier post, my grandfather had set up a correspondence between family members called fingerprints. I settled on thefingerprint.net, which was adequately catchy and still referenced my family history. I can look at at it as reading like “The fingerprint,” meaning my impression on the web, or “The finger print” (with the pause), to suggest a printing press.
The most useful things I learned in the class were css and php, as they are powerful tools for web design. While wordpress is a neat phenomenon, I feel that it stunts creativity and contributed to a homogenization of how websites look.
I still have a lot of work to do before i give my presentation, but I will have woven my different pages together by Friday.