Personal Website

[AElliott]

Alex-elliott.co.uk is my personal website, mostly just a collection of information about my projects and a blog. It has been online for a while, but I haven't actually gotten most things working until recently (I got the blog up and then had a long break for university work). There's still more that I want to add for the project pages, like references to categories in the blog, and links to external sites.For now it mostly suffices, it's just the page on Expression Editor that suffers from lack of detail (if you're interested, it's a Regular Expression editing tool [screenshot] hosted in a public git repository - you may or may not find it useful, but I had to make it when KRegExpEditor wasn't ported to KDE4).Comments welcome on the site or the projects.

[Synook]

Not bad, your grid seems to be a bit out of line though. Also, it would be good to have those article titles in the footer clickable.

[MrFish]

It's a nice design, easy on the eyes and professional. In your portfolio I can't find a link to that other site, which doesn't do you much good if you ask me. Also, each page takes a while to load. It may be because of your hosting service or because it looks like you're in the uk? And that could cause a slower connection. But it also may because you aren't trying to cut image sizes. I've noticed you use a lot of png images. Yes pngs hold high image quality but I would use jpgs and gifs as much as possible without a noticeable decrease in image quality. The human eye can't even see all 32bits of color so you have some room for de-provement. Try to make your site as lightweight as possible, if clients don't notice the speed, you've done it right. On the other hand, people are very impatient, if your site takes more then even 8 seconds to load people will leave. I never view portfolios or websites that are built in flash. I will never wait that long for a page to load, it's just lazy. The general rule of thumb is that your site should never be more then 50kb. But that certainly doesn't mean you should go wild if you are far below that, I would improve a site that is even 5kb if I could get it down to 2kb. It's just good practice and not considering this doesn't present you as a professional, in my opinion anyway.I wish you didn't use an editor, I can't read this!

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Do you know how to build pages in html/css? It's a good skill to know.

[Synook]

PNGs are recommended over JPGs or the legacy GIF format for web graphics. The JPEG format should only be used for photographs. If you want, you can always save the image as PNG-8 - but with only 256 colours, the difference is noticeable. Also note that the highest colour depth in use for PNGs is 24 bits (PNG-24), not 32 bits.Also, for the record, the site he posted is in HTML, and the JavaScript posted above is minified - to reduce its size.It took me 3.88 seconds to load the page.

[AElliott]

@Synook: Thanks, yeah, I should. May get to that today, it's a quick fix. Done.

It's a nice design, easy on the eyes and professional. In your portfolio I can't find a link to that other site, which doesn't do you much good if you ask me. Also, each page takes a while to load. It may be because of your hosting service or because it looks like you're in the uk? And that could cause a slower connection.

Yeah, I noted it lacked detail previously. That being said, the portfolio section is probably the least important bit to me, because I'm not using this to drum up business (it's just a record of things I've done). I'm planning on getting a job on the basis of my eventual degree instead. Anyway, more detail is planned for those pages, I intend to add extra relations to the project database so I can relate various other things to the information shown.EDIT: External links section added to project/portfolio pages.As to speed, I think that's just a case of my VPS being sluggish, I may migrate elsewhere at the end of this payment cycle. (can't say I'm liking CentOS much for one thing - awful having come from a nice clean Slackware ) For me it's not too slow, takes a second to think about it then loads the page, if you check your ping latency that might suggest that it's a network issue.

I wish you didn't use an editor, I can't read this!

As noted above this is minified JS (and third-party at that), they're useful JS libraries, though I realised I don't really need most of them around all the time, so highcharts isn't on the main pages any more.

Do you know how to build pages in html/css? It's a good skill to know.

Certainly do, check out the source.

[Mencarta]

Nice, but I have to say your PasteSite.Com is my favorite. If you have noticed I have even posted some stuff on there.

[MrFish]

Also, for the record, the site he posted is in HTML, and the JavaScript posted above is minified - to reduce its size.

Minified meaning no whitespace? I don't think whitespace would do much to the size.

[AElliott]

@Mencarta: cheers @MrFish: Well, if you're interested you can see for yourself, the example there is minified jQuery. http://jquery.com/ has links for both minified and uncompressed source files to download. Download both and see the difference in practice.

[Mencarta]

Cheers to you too!

[Synook]

Minified meaning no whitespace? I don't think whitespace would do much to the size.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minification_(programming)Basically, you remove any redundant characters (spaces, newlines, etc.) you can, and make any variable/function/etc. names as short as possible. It actually does take quite a bit off (e.g. with jQuery, as above).