Minimalistic

8th Light Apprenticeship - Day 14

Friday afternoons are wasa time, a chance to work on your own projects. Today I dedicated my time to improving my website.

It had originally been thrown together quickly, (I actually put it together for the 8th Light application form!) and I had used a website tutorial on github pages as a starting point. Having adapted some of the content, I had redundant css and templates that were not being used. Above all that however, I had some images and a twitter feed that was covering up my blog posts if you were viewing them on a small screen, such as through a mobile device.

To start with I got jekyll running locally on my mac. This allowed me to spin up a local server so I could see the reaction when tweaking different tags. Having no experience with css, I called upon one of my mentors who paired with me for a while. He had some ideas on how to improve the look and feel of the site. Whilst I had not seen anything too wrong with the website, now that it is tidier I can see the improvement. This proved that when designing any product, it is good to seek opinons from different people. What you like, may not appeal to the masses.

Enrique helped me improve the consitancy of the site, wrapping text around my photograph, so that the text could span across the width of the whole page. He wanted to remove the 1940 text style, which was one thing I didn’t agree to. Something about it I like. Maybe it makes me feel like a secret agent. What I did agree too was merging some of the pages together. By having my contact details on the ‘About’ page, I was able to remove a page and a layout that were no longer necessary.

He pointed out that by having a twitter feed displaying I was mixing two mediums. If you want to look at twitter, you look at twitter, rather than someone’s website. The best thing I learnt was that the mac has a simulator, so you can see what your webpage will look like on other apple devices such as the iPhone or iPad. Another way of testing before your real deployment.

Aside from that everyone in the office did a lightening talk. I decided to talk about technical debt, and how to tackle it incrementally rather than as a big refactor. The post it was based on can be read here.

I also finished preparing my slides for the training next week. I’m looking forward to getting it underway, and also returning to my tic tac toe game. The next task there is to improve the user experience. I think I’ll keep it minimalistic, just like my improved website.