Assignment 1: The Proposal

For my final project, I would like to redesign and overhaul my current personal website, benjamin-taylor.com, which up until now primarily functions as a showcase for my music. While I do feel that I still need a website for my music, I am coming to terms with the idea that it would be better to format the site differently to be more of a complete portfolio website, with a cleaner, more text-based design, that would include my music under a tab rather than monopolizing the entire site. 


Here's a look at the design of my current site:

It's no secret that my site is photo-rich and colorful. For my new site, I am going for a more professional feel, with minimal photo usage (however there will still be a photo or two of myself, because I feel that is important. 

I really like the design of this blog.reybango.com (pictured below). Although this site is primarily a blog, I still like the clean and minimal formatting. I like that his header is just his name and that the nav bar is nothing flashy or colorful: just a simple rollover from light grey to dark. However,  I don't like the colorful widgets he has on the side, including the color photo of himself. I feel like if he wanted to include the picture on the homepage, he should have made it black and white to better fit into the schematics of the site. 

Take a look at this rollover pop-up for "Browse." Although some of the text is broken (the alignment), I love this look. 

As of now, my site's nav bar is comprised of the following:

• Home
• Music
• Bio
• Events
• BenFlips (blog)
• Contact

As I previously mentioned, I am going to consolidate all of this information into one tab, "Music," on my new portfolio website. However, I will be keeping a tab for the benflips.com blog, which will just link to my tumblr (unless I can play around with an API and mount the blog directly into my site, because I'm sure this is possible. I am not 100% positive as to what my new nav bar will contain, but I'm assuming it will look something like this:

• Home
• Resume (or "Work")
• Design
• Music
• Bio
• Links (which will probably not be a tab, rather just displayed on the homepage) 

I would like my homepage to be a sampling of the rest of the site. Perhaps a screen capture of my resume, a recent video from my youtube, my tweets, link to my linked in, etc. 


I would like my logo to be text-based and simple. Again, I am really going for a streamlined, professional look. The same will apply to the nav bar. I am more concerned with the nav bar being effective and text-based and useful rather than flashy/graphic and button-based. 



What has really inspired me to even redesign my site (which I only created 5 months ago), is this class and what we have learned thus far. I want my site to be based off of style sheets and have the ability to change the color of a rollover by merely specifying so in the style sheet rather than having to overhaul the graphics and using the method of making two different graphics in photoshop. I am going to move away from clunky webdesign and attempt to make a minimal, clean and fast site.