Welcome to the revitalization of arrowood.design! I bought the domain almost 3 years ago now so that I can own the domain and use it for emails, thinking eventually I would design the site to be a secondary hub for my portfolio to live. I knew that I wanted to learn more about UX/UI and having this project would be a wonderful way to finally have an excuse to do it. I’ve found the best way for me to learn a new skill is to actively have a project reliant on me learning those new skills. Unfortunately, between graduating and getting my first jobs out of college, I haven’t had the time to give the site the TLC it needed.
When I first bought the domain, I created a placeholder design for the site with the help of my partner, Con. There was nothing wrong with it, but after nearly three years, it grew to be painfully outdated. The web design is also extremely amateur - which made sense, considering I was extremely amateur! After taking a UX/UI course at Thomas More, I began paying a lot more attention to the various different sites I visited and how they functioned.
It also helped a lot that Con is a front end web dev and was able to answer questions I had as needed. I watched how they created sites and the decisions they made when designing. I have been taking notes for the last several years, but the straw that broke the designer’s back to finally sit down and dedicate myself to this project was actually my friends starting their own websites! Blogs where they talk about their professional and personal lives, where they make the rules for how everything functions. And I LOVED the idea and wanted to join in! Sometimes, peer pressure can be a good thing!
I started making this site from a Jekyll template, which still looks quite similar. It’s my plan to keep close to the template for as long as it doesn’t make sense to anymore. I’ll branch out and add new things, or take away other things, as it suits the needs of me and my website. For now, it’s doing a wonderful job of serving as my portfolio site. Anyway, how did I learn enough HTML and SCSS to do this? Honestly, it was a lot of messing with code and seeing what happened.
I was determined to do this myself, only asking Con questions when I got truly stuck, or needed to know how to Google something - which is a severely underrated skill! It’s hard to know the right questions to ask if you don’t quite know what it is you’re asking. My friends with their own blogs also let me look at their code as well! That helped a lot, since their sites were often more simplistic and had cut a lot more fat than the base template had. Although, the template itself also helped. The creators have done a wonderful job of explaining what everything did while organizing everything in a very intuitive way. I’m really happy with how it looks and works! There are a lot of comments before lines of code that explain what exactly the code does. This was very helpful for me to be able to search for different things I was looking for. I’ve also been working through a free online course called Free Code Camp, which teaches some basic HTML through practice. I want to expand more into blogging as well. I plan on retroactively writing more posts for things I’ve done in the past few years that would be interesting to write about. I’ve actually written a lot in the past, I’ve kept a diary for nearly 10 years now, so writing about the things I’ve been up to is a skill I’ve been fostering for awhile.
