Casabona.Org v2.0 (finally)

You might recall that just over 13 months ago, I posted this, announcing the official launch of my second personal site, Casabona.Org. I also wrote a somewhat lengthly ‘schematic’ of the site for those who were interested to read. The original idea was to showcase and build my PHP/MySQL skills. For that reason, the design suffered a little. I also wanted Casabona.Org to be a catch all website for my personal and professional…stuff, for lack of a better word.

After realizing that keeping up Casabona.Org as a second blog, which is essentially what it was, was too much work and somewhat redundant, I decided to change the scope of that project. With the redesign of this site, it was a little easier to look at Casabona.Org now as a solely professional site. Cutting out all of the personal content on the site left me with 3 crucial elements: Resumé, Portfolio, Contact Info. A redesign was also in order.

For the redesign, I wanted the site to look professional, and like I put some sort of effort into the layout. I used a good amount of CSS with image gradients (such as the top of the background and the portfolio item backgrounds) and some other design bells and whistles, like the strips in the top right, and the footer image. I also wanted to do some shadowing to give some elements of the site a 3D effect and while I didn’t do the body of the site that way, I think where I did add a drop shadow (banner and portfolio thumbnails) makes the site ‘come alive’ a little more. All in all, I am very happy with the design, and how each element plays a part in the whole scheme of the site.

The focus of the redesign came with the Projects page. I needed a nice place on the site to display my entire design portfolio- websites, desktop publishing and multimedia. I created a database with 2 tables- one for websites and one for other projects. While both tables would be similar, I did this primarily for the back end and adding new projects. I then made the development and publish pages like film strips or slideshows, so my portfolio is easily navigatable. The end result was a dynamic, easy to update, easy to use portfolio and home for all of my projects.

After about 6 months of on and off work, and a great amount of time put into the site, I can say I am very happy with its outcome, and hope the users feel the same way. Later.