Building My Website (1): Starting with the basics

My first blog post! And I’m using it to celebrate the first publish of my personal/resume/portfolio website: daniellinehan.me.

I say personal/resume/portfolio because my intention is that it will be a bit of each. Somewhere to show my skills and experience to employers, but also somewhere to record and show my own ideas. The hope is that this will prove useful to me over time, but also give employers a better idea of my interests and the type of work I do.

At the time of writing, the website looks like this:

This is what I mean when I use a blog title like “Starting with the Basics”. The intention was to create a website with the minimum possible amount of detail that could still provide useful information to a visitor.

The bare information provided is: 1) My Name, 2) My Current Job Title, and 3) My Profile Pic. I think it’s fair to say that describes who I am in one small nugget of information.

Of course, once I start thinking about it, Business Analyst only describes part of what I do, and leaves any of the tasks I do that might be carried out by a Scrum Master, Product Owner, UX Designer, QA Engineer and so on. And come to think of it, I’m not sure I’m too happy with resolution of that profile pic.

So I’ve started with the basics, and provide some useful information, but I’ll need to start improving on what’s there, and adding more useful features to the site.

My plan for now is to get the most amount of useful information added as soon as possible. I’ll start with some links to this Blog, my UX Portfolio and social media profiles. Then I should be able to get a Contact page up pretty quickly, and also start hosting my blog posts within the site. Over time I’ll start adding more relating to my skills, experience and interests. That (along with a higher resolution image), should give a fuller picture.

A few other notes on how I got the site up and running. The site is hosted on Webflow. I chose Webflow after looking at a few other options but found that Webflow gave me the best combination of ease of use and maintainability, but with flexibility to make my own changes. I have enough HTML/CSS knowledge to be able to manage a more advanced editor, and wanted something more dynamic than the static offerings that SquareSpace seemed to give. I also found Webflow to be more maintainable than Wordpress, with less need to keep up to date with changes to templates and plug-ins etc.

The template I am using is Minimalfolio X by Brix templates:

I chose this template as it gives me everything I need functionally and doesn’t have any overly bright colouring or flashy transitions. These seem designed more to show off the UI than the content. I prefer something minimal, though as I work more on the site, I will try to add a bit more colouring and contrast between sections.

My domain is hosted on Namecheap, and was relatively easy to set up other than a couple of DNS issues (basically having to include “www.” in the default address).

I decided on using a .me domain after getting this link in an email from Dribble. It seems to be used in a lot of professional websites and you’re more likely to find an unregistered domain there than with a .com.

See you in the next iteration!

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