HT: Cult of Mac
New Personal Logo
During the process of creating my new site I had to tackle a project that had vexed me for a very long time. I needed a personal logo.
My inspiration came from Michael Hyatt. I loved his simple use of his initials and the strong font for the name. I pulled in the “swish thing” that I have used in the past for my Illuminate Media logo and kept the orange color that I have used before. A couple of gradients later and this is what I can up with!
For me this is a big part of the new design since this site focuses primarily on what I do across my personal and professional life.
What do you think?
New Home Page
Part of my inspiration was using the fantastic Standard Theme for a client site. The simplicity and flexibility of the theme inspired me. I also quickly realized that it would allow me to build in all the features that I needed to build one site for all of my needs.
For this site I wanted a home page that was not a blog. I wanted a home page slider (the large graphic in the middle of the home page). I love rotators because they give you the option to feature anything from a single post to a section of the site. For now I’m just putting graphics for the portfolio section of the site and the blog.
To add the slider I used the WEBphysiology Portfolio plugin. The biggest thing that drew me to this plugin was that it used a custom post type to add slides. By using WordPress’ built in ability to schedule posts and another plugin called Post Expirator, I am able to both add and remove slides from the home page on any schedule.
At the bottom of the page I wanted to direct visitors in a little more detail to a few areas of the site along with details about contacting me. In this section I used a plugin called J-Shortcodes to give me the ability to easily add columns. I also used the “archives” shortcode to add the links to the blog posts on the right side.
Bradley.cc Relaunch
Its been a couple of years since I took significant time to work on my personal websites. During that time I have built several websites for other people and learned a lot along the way about what I could do to make my site better. All that was missing was my discipline to build a new site for myself.
Today I am relaunching bradley.cc as a combined site for my blog and portfolio site.
I’ll post more about what went into the new site over the next couple of days!
In the mean time… what do you think of the new site?
