After residing on my to-do list for quite some time, I can finally cross off “re-design website”. It was really difficult for me to get motivated to re-design michaelkretz.com, what with my internship in Geneva Switzerland, my game (Blade of Eternity) to manage and develop for, and the fact that I would rather looking up all the latest updates and techniques for PHP, AJAX, jQuery instead of re-working my online identity. My internship is ending in 2 and a half months and I needed to promote myself and my work through my digital identity. The static web site built for my 4th year pre-thesis class would just not cut it anymore, not if I wanted to look attractive to potential employers. I work best under pressure, so over the past couple weeks I’ve put pressure on myself to design a nice looking resume, and re-design my website, so that my job applications would look attractive.

My previous website was built as an HTML site with a jQuery slider to show off my previous work. There was not really any thought to scalability or flexibility, as the point of it was to show off my work and to get a good grade. Blogging was not something that I saw myself doing so I never attempted to incorporate any blogging tools or CMS into my site. It was a nice site for its time, and I did end up getting a very good mark on it, however it was time to transition to the professional realm and build a website that I would consistently update and maintain. Also, I believe that by blogging, I will challenge myself to learn more, show-off my non-design work, and build my credibility as a web designer and front-end developer.

So that brings me to the web site re-design.
It didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped.
I chose to use a theme for my website as I’ve worked with WordPress before, but nothing overly extensive. I also didn’t have the time to spend learning how to make a new theme. So I shopped around for some good looking themes that I could modify into my own. I came across a very clean and promising theme on themeforest.net called “Fringetech”. After testing out the live preview, I decided to make the purchase (my first ever). For about a week, I tried to customize the theme to my likings. I just wanted to have a home page (with recent blog updates, some information about Blade of Eternity and contact details), a portfolio page and a blog page. After getting most of the web site customizations in, I hit a road block when trying to work with the posts. It seems that the Fringetech creator had decided to move away from the core WordPress post system and use his own blog modification. This didn’t work so well, as many plugins would not work correctly, and blog posts were not stored in the default database location. Moving to another theme would be a nightmare. I tried to work with a bit more to, but it was just not worth the time and effort, so I ended up requesting a refund.

My advice: DON’T PURCHASE THE FRINGETECH THEME

Perhaps I was a bit too hasty in buying the theme, but it did teach me a lot of about how WordPress is structured, and gave me some experience modifying it. Nevertheless, I had to find myself another theme. My search led me the theme Eptonic on themeforest, which is the theme that my website ended up being built upon. The creator made it really easy to add customize content and I only had to modify some areas to get the desired functionality. There are some kinks that need to be worked out still, but I am quite happy with the end result.

Thus, I present to you, my website michaelkretz.com.