The long overdue makeover of my web development portfolio here at webnelly.com is finally underway and live now.

There will be a few kinks to work out, such as missing links and maybe a few images from previous posts, but that’s part of the process.

I went with the portfolio-focused WordPress theme, BlueBubble, and I plan on make a few tweaks along the way. Oh, and speaking of WordPress, that is now the driving engine of the site and blog, which has been the latest one of my sites migrated over from Blogger. Needless to say, I’ve been more than pleased with WordPress since starting with it last year.

The sites in the portfolio section also need to be flushed out again, but for now, all the previous pages have been moved to archive.webnelly.com.

Look for more news soon.

– Kris

This post is coming in a few days later than I had originally hoped, but that’s okay. 2008 was a very busy and successful time for me in regards to my personal work online, and I wanted to take a moment or two and recap some of the highlights and numbers.

I just wanted to leave a quick post about a few content updates that I have finished for webnelly.com.

First, after launching Maui Wall Candy, I added information about the site to the Personal Portfolio section. While I was making changes there, I decided to go back and update/finish details for all the previous sites in the section, making it a little be more expansive.

The second update is for the Professional Projects page, which was one of the more recent additions to the site. It features some high level information about projects I have worked on in my professional career using a range of Microsoft technologies. I thought it was somewhat worth mentioning because it is almost the other end of the spectrum with technologies I use for sites in my portfolio. I sometimes like to call it my double life.

The Professional Projects page currently lists details of 18 projects that I have been a worked on in the past 7 years. It covers three different phases of my career so far: when I started as a developer, my 3 years as a development manager, and most recently going back to the lead developer role.

Lastly, I added a Contact page as a link off of the About Me page. I wasn’t feeling very inspired to write the form logic myself, so I decided to put up another EmailMeForm as I did for Maui Wall Candy (which wouldn’t allow me to write my own form handler).

Next Steps

One of the final pages there that really needs my attention to finish is the Technology section. While my initial goal was to maintain a list of technologies I’ve used on the first page and link to more detail pages with examples for each, I have had a hard time finding time to get that specific. I know content is king, but I might start with a prince instead and just have the details and links to examples on the first page and come back to add the details later. I can probably add a few new links to the Links page as well.

Also, with my recent work on Maui Wall Candy, and with looking at various people’s photography portfolio sites, I was inspired to start my own. It’s going to feature details about my recent interest in photography, gear and software I use, and where to find my photos. Right now, the two main spots are Flickr and Maui Wall Candy, but there is a few opportunities to branch out my photos into more places as well.

Stay tuned.

While it’s not a full site redesign, it does feel better than what it was before.

I started by moving the site navigation up to the top and be horizontal rather than vertical. I started to play around with having the logo overlap the navigation a little, which led me into doing absolute positioning in CSS (of which I hadn’t tried out very much). The end result took some tweaking, but I’m happy for now.

Also, to help fill out the horizontal navigation, I added two more sections that I’m expanding on. The first is Projects, which is going to feature details of the various projects I’ve worked on in my professional (corporate) career. This will be set up to contrast on the technologies side with what’s listed in the Portfolio section, which features the personal sites I have worked on in my spare time.

The second new section I’m working on is the Technology section. This section will feature many of the technologies I use in my personal sites (to start) and provide some insight and examples of how I implemented them. They’re not targeted to be full blown tutorials or anything like that (as if I have that kind of time), rather more of just an overview and inspiration for anyone else interested to want to learn more.

These sections look a little (or a lot) empty right now, and will take some time and commitment for me to get around to updating it all, but I’ll get to most of it eventually.

If you’re reading this, you can probably tell I updated the look and feel of the blog to match the new changes to the site design as well. If it’s also your first time reading here, you probably didn’t notice how blank it was before.

That’s where I’m at with updating this site for now, short of adding all that content to the new sections. Time to spend my efforts elsewhere.

One of my todo items for the Ka’anapali Dreamin’ website was to feature other websites in the Reviews section. As part of that, I wanted to include a way to include a preview of the site I’m reviewing.

I came across websnapr. It’s just a very simple site that lets you enter in a URL and it generates an image in one of various sizes. To test it out, I used it to add previews of my own sites at webnelly.com. You can check it out by viewing one of the site pages here.

Update – 4/25/10: These website previews have been replaced with static images in the new portfolio theme of the website.