About this site

This website was created using the above web technologies.

For this “about me” website I use a CMS (content management system) to manage the content. The alternative to this was to create a static site where all the content was “hard coded” into the page and the design. I decided against this due to the fact that in the future I will need to update skills, work history and my details and by having the content managed independently from the site code I can easily add/change my content and design.

The CMS I chose is WordPress.The main reason I chose it is because it is very developer friendly and has a large amount of documentation and community support. If I encountered an issue there was most likely an answer to my problem which helped reduced the development time for the site. Also while it was initially created as a blogging platform, it is extremely flexible and can be adapted to suit many needs and can be altered so drastically that it no longer resembles a basic blog.

I have utilised previous experience with PHP and HTML/CSS when creating this page to reduce the amount of required 3rd party plugins required to provide functionality to the site. The only plugin that is used that provides any functionality or visual enhancement to the site is WP_Gallery_Custom_Links. This is for custom links from gallery images as the WordPress core doesn’t currently allow for external links unfortunately.

To create the visual layout I used a blank WordPress theme from HTML5Blank.com, I used this blank theme as it gave me the required base to create a fully customised theme template from which I had the ability to modify to suit my sites vision.

From there I utilised a jQuery script called Masonry.js which I later found out is included in the WordPress core (handy!). Masonry.js allowed for a layout that easily displayed the different skills/jobs that I posses in a very user friendly format which doesn’t favour or apply extra bias to content based on when it was added. One of the big draws to this script was that it makes the site semi-responsive (adaptable for smaller screens/devices) without a lot of the extra CSS and design work.