For my overhaul, I decided to take the opposite tack of many designers. Instead of designing a pretty shell and trying to fit my content to it, I’m going to start with the content and then design around it. For the dynamic content (mainly the portfolio and blog) I plan to use some sample content and the existing entries so that when I design around them, I have a good variety of potential content for these areas to account for different sizes, amounts, and media.

There are a number of reasons why this approach makes sense. The main one? Because the content is what you’re here for. Awesome graphics are pretty, but you’re not here to look at the nice images I can create in Photoshop (unless you are, in which case I would like to direct you to my portfolio, which I will link as soon as I have the new url). If the content is not well organized and easily accessible and, most of all, interesting to peruse, you’ll hit the site and bounce in under thirty seconds.

Choosing content-first also gives me the chance to rework what I’m presenting to be couched in semantically correct html. Previous versions of this site were created before browsers had progressed far enough to allow full-on styling, when sliced images and nested divs were the height of design. Now that sites need to be mobile-accessible, this makes serving up a lower-bandwidth version of the site difficult. Every extra character adds to the time it takes to download a page on a phone or tablet, so it behooves me to remove as much of the detritus of designs past as I can manage, so that I can get the content to you faster.