New portfolio design 2015
After many months of work, I am happy to announce today that I have finally released the new design for my portfolio. It is the first redesign in nearly three years with a modern, clean and crisp interface using many of the hallmarks of web design in 2015.
Not only is the design new, but it is also for the first time responsive. That means if you visit the website with a smartphone or tablet (or simply make your browser window smaller), it will change and adapt to fit the new format. There are a ton of high quality frameworks out there that make responsive website design extremely easy, but I wanted to do it all myself, so I created all of the necessary CSS classes and JavaScript functions necessary to make the new design responsive.
For many years, my portfolio has been available in both English and German, but this new design is the first time I have used separate domains for each language. https://www.alexseifert.com will bring you to the English version of it and https://www.alexseifert.de will take you to the German version. While I have had the .de domain for a while, it has always just redirected users to the .com domain. Now they really are completely separate websites. I decided to go this route because I know that German speakers tend to automatically add “.de” to a website rather than “.com” and thought it might be easier to find this way. Plus it just looks neat.
Another major change is the use of a secure connection. If you have a look at the URL of this blog, it now uses HTTPS. Both https://www.alexseifert.com and https://www.alexseifert.de also use HTTPS now as well as History Rhymes. The only website of mine still not using a secure connection is my music website, but that will come soon. I am a big advocate of privacy and it only seemed logical to use a secure connection for my websites because of that. Not only that, but it was interesting and a challenge to setup as I had never really done it before. I will expand upon that though in another post.
The new homepage also now cycles through a few random images. The screenshot above of my MacBook and a plant is just one of several that all have to do with the three major themes of my portfolio: web development, music and history. It’s a small thing, but I couldn’t decide which image I liked most, so I just built a mechanism to use them all at random.
One last little detail about the website is its use of images ready for displays with a high pixel density (like the Retina Displays from Apple). These images are generally larger in size, but the website is smart enough to detect whether the visitor has a high pixel density display or not and then will load a smaller or larger image depending on the display. The exception to this rule is with mobile devices. Since most mobile users will visit the website with a limited data plan, the website will always load the smallest possible image.
I have tested the new design extensively, but if you run into any problems, I would appreciate the feedback. I am reachable via the contact form at the bottom of every page. Thank you!
English version: https://www.alexseifert.com
German version: https://www.alexseifert.de
