Drumminhands Design 1.0

Drumminhands Design websiteThe first homepage layout for Drumminhands Design

Client: Myself

Role: Interactive designer and developer

Primary goal: A portfolio website to showcase design and development work

Tertiary goals: Build a back-end from scratch utilizing PHP and MySQL to communicate with the Flash and PHP based front-ends

Technology used: XHTML, CSS, MySQL, PHP, Flash, Actionscript, XML

The Good

My first portfolio website had a lot going for it:

  • The primary front-end was built in Flash and connected to a custom PHP/MySQL back-end.
  • The design was simple, yet effective.
  • A secondary front-end used PHP to display a non-flash version of the website for accessibility and search engine optimization.

The Not-so-good

Ultimately, the site needed a new face (enter Drumminhands Design 2.0) because of a few reasons:

  • Scalability. Although the back-end accomplished the small scope it was built for, improvements were difficult and required a lot of development. It would be better to use an open source content management system.
  • Using a Flash-only primary front-end resulted in a disconnect from form and function. Search engines and screen readers should be reading the same pages as most visitors through standard browsers.
  • Analytics. The Flash-only front-end also made it difficult to track what users were doing within the site.