Site Developments!
My Apologies for the current state of this website. On Mon 27 June 2011, I switched to a skeleton/style-less template which I'll style and make my own. In '09, I used an off-the-shelf template which I customised, showing that I could build a site with the Joomla CMS. Now I see that this was a bad move - for a web designer. Using a pre-made template might be a mature, efficient thing to do; especially as most designers prefer to do everything ourselves (we're often labelled: 'precious') but:
The pros of this approach for a portfolio site are that
- it's faster,
- shows off the work you've done for clients and yourself,
- and demonstrates an ability and flexibility to work with a very tricky CMS and customise pre-made templates.
The cons are that
- the portfolio site is not actually all your own work - only the work exhibited in it, the efficiencies of a quickly built feature rich site are offset by a somewhat rigid framework that hamper your further creative efforts,
- and you feel trapped within this off-the-shelf template with all of it's overly complex and quirkly HTML and CSS.