For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a new website layout and here it is. The logo at the top actually goes back few months when I started a new design to incorporate my portfolio into this website, but ended up ditching the design. After a recent design job, I decided to give it another go. This time I’m very pleased with the results. I took my time, for the most part, and tried not to rush anything. In the end, I couldn’t wait to push the site live though, and it currently is not completely finished. There are probably a handful of little things to go back and finish along with the only major part of the design to finish, the portfolio page.

There were many things that I liked about the old site. When I first did the design, I really liked the two sidebars. It gave me lots of space to display information such as my twitter, delicous, and last.fm feeds, as well as my blogroll, web projects and google ads. The problem with all the feeds is that they really slowed the site down and there was too much static content taking up space on the hompage. I’ve replaced the feeds from the old design with one feed to rule them all. To do this, I’ve used SimplePie, which caches the feeds, so everything is much faster.

My favorite part of the design has got to be the portfolio scroller on the homepage (seen in the image above), which will eventually be dynamically generated when I add something to the portfolio. I also only included the latest post on the homepage with the next 5 excerpts.

This is the third major design of the site since it moved to joshbetz.com in July 2008.