Probably my largest weakness as a designer is my inability to be happy with my designs. I am a perfectionist in a way that hinders my ability to say, “I’m done.” I am never done with a design. I always try to find a way to make the design better and in doing so, find myself going back to projects already completed and continue to work on them (just for fun). It was this feeling of inadequacy that led me to change the design of my prior website.

My old site was for my business Saav Media. The biggest problem that I had with the website wasn’t the aesthetics (which I had grown tired of), it was the lack of a content management system to be able to update my portfolio and news. While I had implemented Wordpress for my news section, it wasn’t as intuitive and easy to use as I needed it to be. In regards to the portfolio section, I had to manually add and change all the work pages every time I added a new project. The amount of time needed to add new projects to the portfolio section led me to leave a lot of projects off my website because I didn’t have the time to add them. With this website, I made sure to make things better.

This website is one of the more complex websites that I have designed. I decided to use the ExpressionEngine content management system because it allowed me the flexibility to design a website I want with very little focus on server side programming. ExpressionEngine is very intuitive and far more advanced and easier to use than Wordpress (an open source blogging platform). Because ExpressionEngine uses special “tags” to access information, all I had to do was design my website in static XHTML and CSS. Once completed, I brought the code into ExpressionEngine and inputted the necessary tags to get the information I needed. In all, it took me three days to convert my website from a static XHTML website into a dynamic website. My experience with ExpressionEngine has definately been a positive one. Because of the ease of use of the control panel, and the short amount of time it takes to implement the CMS, I will definately be using ExpressionEngine as my first choice for content management systems for my clients.

Now looking at the front-end development of the website, you will first notice the change in colour palette. Where my old website and branding focused on black and red, my new logo and colour scheme focus on an almost florescent blue and dark grey. The logo itself has also changed to work as a symbol - be recognized without words. If you don’t see it, it combines to form C and S. To get inspiration for the logo, I looked at companies like Apple, Nike, Gap, Adidas, and many other large corporations and noticed that all of them have one thing in common: simplicity. I decided to look at ways to design a simple but effective logo, so I immediately started trying to fit my initials into the design. After playing around for a few hours, I came to the logo you see on this site. I feel its simple, recognizable, focused and strong.

Moving forward, I hope you enjoy my website, and I promise now that the infrastructure is in place, I will be updating my website quite frequently. I also hope to start writing some tutorials and designing free stuff once I get settled in. If you find any problems on the site, please comment on this post and I’ll get to fixing it right away.

Take care.