How my website’s design has evolved

Posted 25th June 2020 in Brand and Design

Yesterday’s post on Why I haven’t ‘redesigned my portfolio’ since 2014 got me thinking. How has my website evolved? I did some digging on the Internet Archive WayBack Machine (and filled in one or two gaps where images were missing) and the results are quite interesting.

May 2012

By May 2012, after more than a year of trading, my business establishing nicely. I was starting to win freelance work with local agencies to supplement the then-core business of designing, building and maintaining small business’s websites. The design was very 2012, with plenty of heavy gradients and drop shadows, and a few accessibility no-nos (like no clear <h1>) sprinkled in for good measure. But at that point I was so busy with client work that my website had to take a bit of a backseat.

May 2012, with a gradient background in the header, lots of drop shadows and heavy use of the Courier New typewriter font

January 2014

By 2014, my brand and the website’s design had been pretty solid for a number of years, using OCR-A for the logo and Museo Sans for all other typography, #4485c7 as the brand colour, and the gradients and shadows had all been stripped away in line with the ‘flat design’ trends of the day.

Early 2014, pre-rebrand version of my website’s homepage, with a ‘hamburger’ navigation menu, with an emphasis on my work, reinforced by a testimonial

December 2014

Following a rebrand in the summer of 2014, the site’s design took a marked turn to the minimal, with a ‘hamburger’ navigation menu (don’t judge me – we all make mistakes!) and big, bold headings in the new brand font, FS-Me.

2014 version of my website's homepage with the main heading “Web design in a language you can understand”, going straight into examples of my work

June 2018

A snapshot of the site from June 2018, just before I completely rebuilt the it, shows that I abandoned the misguided hamburger menu, and added a video to introduce myself to my potential clients. But otherwise little had changed in nearly four years.

2018 version of my website’s homepage, with the simple heading “I make websites”, followed by a video introduction

Note: Although I completely rebuilt my website, it doesn’t count as a redesign – I changed very little HTML and CSS.

June 2020

Since then, I’ve changed the focus of my website completely. I’m no longer pitching myself to potential clients, whether website owners or larger companies in need of a product designer or frontend developer; rather, it’s essentially a blog, where I write articles that are (hopefully!) useful to my peers.

The design has only changed subtly in the two years since the last snapshot, with darker blues for better colour contrast, and a slightly smaller headline font size.

2020 version of my website's homepage, with the headline “The web, design and frontend development”, going straight to shortcuts to my most recent blog posts

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More posts

Here are a couple more posts for you to enjoy. If that’s not enough, have a look at the full list.

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    There’s an interesting feature in Safari 17.4 that allows content added with CSS to have ‘alt’ text. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

  2. The accessibility conversations you want to be having

    In most companies, accessibility conversations centre around WCAG compliance, but that’s just the start. Thinking beyond that is where you want to be!