Folio: Frisk Design

Type

Website

Date

August 2008

Skills

PhotoShop Design, XHTML & CSS, Wordpress theme, Wordpress as a CMS and extensive customisation

My own website was in need of a serious overhaul so in April 2008 I set about designing a completely new site that would use Wordpress as it’s engine. My previous site had been hand coded and only used Wordpress for the blog — this had meant that every time I wanted to add a new portfolio entry, I had to do it by hand and it was a bit of a pain.

Of course, the cobbler’s children’s shoes syndrome prevented me from treating this as a proper project and I could only do it in my spare time. So it took nearly four months to design and develop the site, not something I could usually afford to do for a client!

The site uses as few plugins as possible and makes use of the extensive customisation that Wordpress offers. It uses a wide array of techniques to turn the site from a simple blog into a full portfolio site: custom templates, queries and functions as well as clever use of image attachments in various parts of the site, without having to use any third party image plugins at all.

I also used category templates extensively to provide different ways of viewing the folio entries. This allows me to present multiple levels of detail for the folio: users can get a good overview of my skills from the early folio pages, but they have the option to drill right down to a specific entry to see more detail if they choose.

This was probably the most complex Wordpress build I’ve done to date and I’m very pleased with the final result.