With the plans for my immediate future pretty much sorted out, I've now got two projects left to do until the summer break when I'm moving down to Cornwall. I can't say too much about the bigger one of the two except that it involves a new aspect of digital design (iPhone web apps) for me and another steep learning curve. I managed to stick to my self-devised curriculum which has pretty much been about digital design. It´s very exciting and lots of fun too.
I can tell you about the other project though, the relaunch of my personal website. I've been working on it sporadically between projects and other work and have finished all the planning work that is necessary before getting my hands dirty with design. I've decided to do a gradual relaunch, which means that I'm going to implement (and test) changes in smaller stages rather than revealing it all at once with a big ta-daa. The reason for this is that although it will probably be more work and take longer to fully implement all the changes, it will still save me time as I can start posting things sooner that I've been holding back until the relaunch.
So what are the changes? Here´s the plan so far: The website will be divided into portfolio and blog, I'll drop the separate introduction, about and contact pages and include them into the other two. There´s going to be a new content strategy for the blog. I'll also weed out all the trash from the portfolio. An important change for those who are reading this in German: I'm sorry to say that I'll drop the German-language blogging. The main reason for this is that translating each and every post into German takes up too much time and stops me from posting more. Although the language switching plugin has been awesome and made multilingual blogging really fun, it´s just not worth the effort anymore, at least in this context.
This website started as a personal website in German when I went to Northern Ireland. It helped me to keep in touch with friends and family and to write about my experiences in the foreign country. It changed to a bilingual blog and portfolio when I went to university and it still made sense to be bilingual throughout my time in Zurich and Munich. However the amount of people reading this in German who wouldn't be able to read it in English too is very small. The purpose of the new blog is not merely to keep friends and family updated anymore as it was years ago. For this I'll prefer the personal contact. The new blog will therefor have a new content strategy and will be in English only.
That´s pretty much the most important change. There will obviously be a lot of visual changes, a new logo and branding, new typography, a new structure, an updated backend and modern web technologies. All this will be implemented gradually over the next weeks. Things might break now and then and it could be a big mess at times, especially when the old database clashes with the new design. But let´s hope it all goes smoothly.
Stay tuned.
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