Here we are, a new site!
I wanted a place to share my design work and write the odd blog post, and although there’s much more I want to still add to it, it already fulfills those main goals at the time of writing this.
My previous portfolio site, that I published around this time last year, was built on Wordpress, using the Elementor theme builder. I had previous experience using Elementor for work, and it worked well for my purposes at the time, but I had been hearing more and more good things about Webflow, and I thought building this site was the perfect opportunity to explore how it works.
Webflow prices are higher, but by the time you've factored in Wordpress hosting, multiple plugin licences, and the time it takes to keep these up to date, it was a simple decision.
To be honest it took me longer than I had expected to get used to it, mostly the way they handle classes and the styling that is applied to them, but building the site has been a good learning experience and I’m feeling much more confident with it now. I’ve barely touched the surface of what is possible with it yet, but I think it would be my go to tool for any future side projects or freelance work. It's certainly enough for my needs as they are people literally recreating full video games with it!
They do have a extensive library of tutorial videos through Webflow University , but I preferred to figure it out as I went.
One of my main goals was to keep the site simple and easy to maintain, which was possible by using Webflow CMS ‘Collections’. These blog posts, and the links to work on my homepage, are all set up as Collections, which means I can add new work links and blog posts through their CMS without having to touch the site designer. Perfect!
Thanks to this handy YouTube video below, I’ve also used Zapier to automatically add new Dribbble shots to the Showcase section on my homepage too. Just need to upload more on Dribbble for that to be useful now!
I'm planning on writing a few basic Figma 'How to' guides, and adapting the design of the site to make it a bit more visual, but happy with this as a starting point!