Pawel Martuszewski Design Website Launch!

Posted on 18th Jul, 2009. Posted in: Admin News, Contribute, Freelance

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I am very happy to announce that the work on my new portfolio has been completed. Or I should rather say that the work just began as I plan to update it often with fresh tutorials and articles about web design and development, tips and tricks and many more… I have a few thoughts to share with you how it’s been and why this website has been created…

The Old Portfolio

My first portfolio website was created as I wanted to find a job really quickly and I needed the portfolio to show up to my future employer. I had a little knowledge of a web design and development and I didn´t really have time for a research, so I created it really quickly without planning just to have something. You can see it here.

first portfolio

After a while I have managed to find the job I wanted and started to learn a lot of new techniques and proper approach to web design and web development. Still studying at the University and working full time I realised that I want to do more with my portfolio and the plan was to make tutorials and articles about web design. I planned everything from top to bottom and started the initial design.

Previous attempts and lost data

I wanted to create the puzzle piece theme. For my future clients it would represent that I am the missing jigsaw puzzle for them and ´they´ should hire me as a freelancer. For web developers the missing jigsaw puzzle would be my article or tutorial obviously. I know this theme is very old and well known but I badly wanted to do it. I have created an initial visual in photoshop and started to think about xhtml. You can see the design below.

initial portfolio design

After that I redesigned it about 3 times and even created an xhtml version structure for it. A preview of this can be found here.

Then something amazing happened. I have lost all of my data from my hard drive without backing it up before and lost everything what I have been working on. It was a really painful experience but I have learned how important is to keep your source files in the safe place and do regular backups. ;) Just before I have lost all of my data, my visual for a new portfolio looked like this.

initial portfolio design

Recovery

When I managed finally to put everything back together (my software). I decided to start from scratch. All the excitement gone after loosing the data, so I just wanted to create something functional and didn´t want to spend too much time on it. At this point I had already a lot of interesting ideas for tutorials of articles I wanted to share with others.

I designed and converted the visual into xhtml as fast I could (still studying and working full time) and here is the final result. You might like it, or hate it ;) I heard so many different opinions about this design. Well, as the web design experience grows, every even the best designed website is going to be not so brilliant very soon. It is because we learn new things and realize that we could do much much better.

To sum up

So welcome everyone to my website. Feel free to leave a comments or ask me anything. I am more then happy to receive any ‘hard’ comments on anything (that will just make me better in the future). Enjoy my articles and tutorials. I hope you will like it.