Three years of the old layout, and I cannot tell you how sick I was of it.

I made it so I could learn CSS. At the time I had no idea what I was doing. I copied other sites shamelessly. It had huge flaws, and things meant to be temporary (like the "logo" in the corner) ended up being permanent.

So over the past few days I've been working on a re-do. I didn't like that what was supposed to be my "portfolio" website had ended up as my worst-looking and worst-functioning. This redesign represents me at a point where I have a pretty decent idea of what I'm doing.

The biggest difference is the layout, of course, but I'm also working on some back-end tune-ups, and I might just give up and re-write the whole thing instead of continuing to patch over and over something I originally wrote when I was 15.

Like always, I tried to stay incremental with the design. Part of me would like to start over from scratch with a new design style, but a larger part of me likes the idea of continually improving on a design until it's an overwrought and tired mess. I liked the randomly-appearing header images up top, so I kept them and made them larger to make it easier to find images that fit. Last time there were 11 images that would appear at random, now there are over 40. They're all photos from Chicago, and they're all taken by me.

I'm also in the middle of replacing the photo gallery with the system I made for GameBump. I could bore you with all the impressive advantages, but I haven't got the time. Maybe you should just try it out yourself:

Launch Gallery: Chicago 2005

(35 images)

I'm not done with it yet. I still need to work on some text formatting and stylize certain elements (like the add-comment form). So... pardon our dust.