category_name=journal&tag=design+design

Explore my moleskin

Welcome to the Papabeta!

Wednesday August 12, 2009

First Display

Hello and welcome to my shiny new website. Well, when I say shiny, I mean shiny with a few finger smudges. I still consider this site to be in beta as it still needs to be tested properly. So if you notice something strange happening, don’t worry! Please send me a message or leave a comment.

Before I go on, I would like to send special thanks to Shannon Carver, developer extraordinaire, for helping me bring this site to life.

As you can see, you are now on the homepage. Here you can see updates on the site, my latest post(s), my latest work, my Twitter, Stumbles, work availability and what I am currently doing to entertain myself these days. All for your viewing pleasure. You can dive deeper in to the site either by using the main navigation above, or going straight to a piece of work or journal post. From there you can navigate through sections, search for something specific, log in to see NDA-protected work and browse through different topics. The rest of the site is pretty self-explanatory. Have a browse, get lost in it all and if you like what you see, let me know!

Enjoy the site! Its been a long time in the making.
(You can read about it here if you like.)

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From Fetus to Papa

Thursday April 16, 2009

Fetus to Papa

It’s been a very long journey through the birth canal to get this project up and running. So long in fact that I’ve started to believe that the project had been cursed by some angry god.



It’s here now though, so it can’t be all bad. But Its almost been a whole year since I first designed and concept-ed this site. It was combination of having a lot of work on and the fact that my developers were dropping like flies. I must have gone through at least 4 or 5 before having Shannon come aboard and finally get this thing together. I don’t want to dis or publicly mention who they are, but if one you is reading this…

HA! ITS ONLINE! *Clears throat* Right… Anyway have a look at some of the earlier versions of the site.
Old site sketches

Papa 1 Papa 2 Papa 3



As you can see, I decided go html from the very start. Even though I am a Flash advocate, I decided to go away from the Flash-based website for my own use. Why?

  1. Because it just isn’t easy to update, plus I do so many different things that making a really cool Flash site to go along with all the content would take forever to build.
  2. The time it would have taken to build it would be even longer than this site.
  3. I just can’t take looking at XML constantly to update my own site.
  4. I wanted a robust CMS system, so WORDPRESS it was.
  5. A fast loading site!
  6. Uber Google-friendly.
  7. Ability to easily change the look and feel of the site for when I get bored with it.

I know that Flash can do all of these things above by all means, but it takes a great developer to do it. Which I am not. Those developers aren’t cheap either.

At the time of writing this, the site isn’t completely finished. I still want to make this custom theme available for download for all. That will take some time, as it still has some way to go to be a Wordpress certified theme. If you notice anything that could help me and Shannon make this site reach full maturity… Don’t be shy! Give us a holla!

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