While the design of my portfolio may not be the most engaging, I do think the content it showcases is well made, and that it does a good job of showing what I'm like in an academic context. The site's language and various projects catalog my problems with college and give a reasonable representation of my inner monologue when it comes to doing work. As far as audience, I really only expect those associated with our class to view my site, and with that in mind it meets their needs pretty well: there are clear ways to access my various projects, my blogs are available, and there's an introductory message about how I feel about the site and its content.
I'm not particularly pleased with the overall design because I didn't do anything terribly interesting with it, but I am glad that I managed to figure out how to change a few things more than just simple font and background color options. And I am happy with the content presented on the site, even if it isn't something I don't want that many people seeing. I don't usually put so much thought and reflection into analyzing my academic troubles, and I'm glad that I did.
If I were an employer viewing my site, I probably wouldn't hire myself. While I'd like to think that someone would see my honest reflection about myself as displaying some deeper positive character traits, the fact that my site's content deals almost exclusively with how bad I am at finishing things is not a stellar way to sell myself. The design also isn't terribly engaging and doesn't particularly set me off as someone with a lot of drive or pizazz. For that reason I'll be taking my site down shortly after the semester is over.
My limited knowledge of CSS kept me from doing anything super fancy with the layout, but that's alright since I tend to prefer simpler, more minimalist designs. My changes were all pretty standard: I changed the color of the header, background, and footer because I wanted something other than just plain black and white, and chose simple muted tones from a palette I liked. I changed the color of the header and body fonts to contract with the new background colors, as well as the color of hyperlinks since bright blue didn't match very well. I switched the page to a slightly more interesting font, Palatino Linotype. To set the header apart I increased the header font size and put a double border around it. Similarly, I set the footer apart by changing it to a darker color, which also necessitated changing the footer font color.
My hope with the color changes was to make something easier to read than plain black and white, and a bit more interesting to look at.
#header
{
background-color:#EEE6AB;
font-size: 150%;
text-style: bold;
border-style: double;
border-color: #45484B;
border-width: 8px;
}
body
{
background-color:#C5BC8E;
color:#45484B;
font-family:"Palatino Linotype";
}
#footer
{
height: 25px;
background-color: #36393B;
color: #C5BC8E;
}
a:link {color: #21211D; text-decoration: none;}
a:active {color: #21211D; text-decoration: none;}
a:visited {color: #696758; text-decoration: none;}
a:hover {color: #21211D; text-decoration: none;}