So, I’ve re-designed my site – It happens every year or so but this time I wanted to do something a little more long-standing (yeh right).

The main change is the use of a mascot which is something I’ve had lurking about for a while, here is his story:

The mascot

A few months ago I commissioned uber-digital-artist Scott Jackson to develop me a mascot for use on the WPFixer project:

WPFixer.com - WordPress design, development and consultancy

The plan was to get hold of a simple character which was loosely based on my physical characteristics (ahem) and although commissioned initially specifically for WPFixer I’ve since decided to use the little chap on a few of my other projects.

Mascot from Scott's tuts+ article from May 2009

You may recognise Mr Jacksons work from his tutorial on Vector|Tuts+ 12 months ago titled “How to create a web site mascot” (see image left).

What you may not know is that this character was lifted from the failed LinksGuy website (Flickr screenshot, the site is now dead).  A useless if not interesting fact.

It didn’t take long for Scott to throw together a new character loosely based on the one used in the article and after giving him a new set of clothing and some accessories I had a brand spanking new mascot to play with.

Culling out the crap

After I had my mascot, all I needed was some free time and the drive to get my site re-done. This started by doing a drastic cull of over 50% of ALL the blog posts on this site.

I dropped all sport, TV, entertainment and general crappy posts and stuck with some new core categories of Design (design stuff), General (general crap), Technology (computers and gadgets), WordPress (its my CMS) and Work (any projects I’m working on).

The layout

I wanted the site to be simple, really simple, and white, no colours, well maybe a few but mostly greyscale. As a base theme for the site I used the excellent ‘TypographyWP‘ theme by ‘superskill‘ which helped be get the new design up and running in hours not days.

The major setback was the jQuery animated header which I toiled over for a couple of days. I wasn’t sure just how to go about implementing this and also even if it was a worthwhile feature – in the end I stuck with it and you can see by sticking your mouse over the header of the site you will get a different message ‘I do solutions‘ > ‘I do results‘ and the navigation will appear along with a colour version of the mascot.

The purpose

I’ve never really utilised this site as a blog. Truth is, I don’t really blog that often, maybe 5 or 6 times a year if I’m lucky. So I knew I couldn’t sell the site as a truly useful blog – instead I’ve gone for a simple ‘elevator pitch‘ approach which says what I do, who I am, where I’m from and how I could help anyone who may need a solution to a web-related problem.

I gained a lot of inspiration from this video over at the99percent which tries to convince digital creatives like such as myself that there is no shame in self-promotion and the only way that you will ever get your talents and skill-set noticed is to talk about them:

Hopefully this will be the last re-boot in a while and I can concentrate on improving on the base that I have created. There are still a few bugs and niggles that need working out and I AM trying to become a more active blogger so maybe this site and domain will finally serve me a purpose :)

Please leave some comments on the new design and I will be happy to respond.

FYI – I do plan on re-packaging the modified WordPress theme as a freebie download as it turned out to be quite different to the base theme I used, just give me chance to get around to that one eh…..