Portfolio Extreme Makeover!
Date: November 28th, 2022
Ok, perhaps extreme is a bit strong, however my portfolio website has received a new coat of paint, some design improvements and better consistency, along with a few updates on the Gatsby back-end. Like a new haircut, or buying a new outfit from the mall, it feels refreshed and 2022'ish.
For those who may be wondering here is a brief overview of the project specs. My portfolio runs on the latest version of Gatsby, and uses Typescript. It's currently hosted via Netlify. The UI was designed using Styled Components, and I use Contentful for the CMS. I invite you to view the Github page to go more in depth in my project, which is fully open source. Let's move on and explore what's new!
Out with the In, In with the Out
Since the original portfolio was released, I've been using a customized yellow color scheme I created. Previously, there was a nice stock photo on the homepage background, but in the new version, I went with a cleaner and less cluttered white and yellow background using svg for the wave. The familiar yellow bright and dark colors are still used, but they are much more consistent than before, and the homepage really pops up at you with high contrast.
Call To Action With More Action
The call to action still displays a greeting, photo and the latest blog entry. New to the cta is a clearer contrast of colors, and the new social icons that point to my Github, LinkedIn and Contact page. The View Projects button is much more prominent, and has a slick new animation.
Captions Version I Lost Count
Captions have new styling on the individual blog and project pages. This might be the 4th or 5th time I've changed them, but now they fit the theme a whole lot better.
Blog Sporting a Fancier Look
The blog list got some styling changes to also be consistent with other changes throughout the website. Some buttons also were changed to stand out more, such as the page buttons, which previously were a bit too small, and off center.
Contact page: Now 50% Easier to Contact Me
Like all buttons, they all share the new Styled Component I built. The mail button was corrected, recent changes to Chrome security broke the old school mailto href.
The 'Ol Cliche
Under the hood, not a whole lot new, much like Gatsby 4, there haven't been many changes beyond some bug fixes here and there in the changelogs. Mainly, I have seen some engine improvements for processing images, better Typescript support, and integrating React Helmet into a standard feature built in Gatsby.
And Where We Are Going Next
I already got a growing list of improvements and bugs after using the new portfolio for a couple weeks. You can view those on my Github issues page. One issue that will take a lot of time, but will make any future changes a breeze is finally solidifying my Styled Components theme provider, and standardizing my theme throughout the website. This will allow changes to color any any future theme design to be a breeze to update. The thing is, the theme provider works, but for the life of me, I don't recall why I never actually used it. That's the life of a busy developer, something that could have saved me tons of time in the future was put off to get something done early on faster.
Besides that, upon us next week is the introduction of my Sophia Python project, and it's own project page. I can't wait to share more about that soon.