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Ask HN: Feedback on a personal site for a coder.

13 points by aarongough ↗ HN
Hey all! I spent yesterday re-building my personal site and I would love to get some feedback on it. The goal of the website is to showcase my recent projects and to raise my profile online, hopefully with the end effect of bringing in more traffic to my open source projects and brining in more consulting work for the company I work for.

Any thoughts/suggestions welcomed. Thanks! http://thingsaaronmade.com/

25 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 53.2 ms ] thread
iamdave
Your TopHat project looks very interesting
aarongough
Thanks! It's actually something I have been using on client sites for almost 3 years in a simpler form. The company I work for specializes in SEO work, so it was important to have a menu solution that matched those goals.

I'll be working more on the project in the next few weeks, adding a test suite for it amongst other things.

braindead_in
Nice design. You might want to revert more conventional design if you are trying to sell your skills/services to companies.
aarongough
Thanks! I guess I'm not trying to talk directly to other companies, the use scenario that I'm hoping for is that other coders would see something useful on the site and then refer me to their company. The other company would then look at the WaldenDesign.com site (where I work)... Do you think that makes sense?
braindead_in
Okay. I misread it. My bad.

If its directed at developers its a great design then. Its cool. And we like cool stuff.

aarongough
No no, all input is valued. Ideally I would like the website to be able to talk to programmers and companies, with a focus on the programmers... I appreciate you thinking it's cool! :-p
wdewind
It would be cool if top hat and icebox had demos
aarongough
Good point! I was actually planning on setting up github pages for them that would link directly the the code off the master branch. That's definitely something I will get to in the next few days.

Tophat is actually running the menus on the website right now as well...

mortuus
Menu subheaders (such as "Rails Plugins" or "Ruby Gems") appear clickable (because of the hand cursor) but do nothing when clicked.

The signature on the about page is a nice touch. =)

angelbob
The open source menu on the bottom has a project not mentioned up top, which is slightly odd, and it just links to the front page of GitHub, which is odd.

You should either mention it everywhere, or take it off that menu :-)

aarongough
The projects up top are just the most recent 4... The open source menu will eventually list everything I've created. I'm betting that you're referring to 'ruby-tmdb'. The repo is actually still private (probably until tomorrow afternoon) as the project is still in-progress, but I didn't want to have to edit the menu again tomorrow. Just laziness on my part...
nuclear_eclipse
Looking at your source code in Firefox, you have a couple missing > in your code:

    <h3
and

    </body
aarongough
Thanks! I actually comitted a change this morning that fixes the <body> tag, but I missed the other one. I'll run everything through a validator and clean things up. I was in a bit of a rush to get everything done yesterday!
Ixiaus
I like the design and I give you kudos for trying out an unusual page layout (navigation bar being on the bottom rather than top). I think it works! Although I will say that it feels more like a designer's website than a programmer's; while design aesthetics are important to me as a programmer, it is generally the content or clever personal projects that give it the icing...

I'm one to speak though, my own website is rather boring! Good job on your site.

aarongough
Thanks for your kind words! I worked to make the site feel a bit more aesthetically pleasing because I wanted to demonstrate that I am perfectly comfortable doing UI design and that in a pinch I can do some graphic/web design.

As long as it doesn't give you the 'programmer wearing a suit' feeling that is... Thoughts welcome!

pclark
Cool. I personally dislike it when freelancers don't _spell out_ what you're looking for: eg contract work, 6 month full time work, etc. And note your availability - today, this month, this quarter, etc.

And ideally a previous project that I can see online, and what the budget & time frame was.

aarongough
Good suggestions! It's worth noting that I'm not actually freelancing though. As it says on the 'About Me' page, any work I take on will be through the company I work for, Walden.
petervandijck
As someone who might hire, there should be a "hire me" link. Which explains what consulting you do.
jcapote
Love the new layout, but was disappointed when I couldn't comment; Is this on purpose, al3x.net style?
aarongough
Thanks Julio! I actually am still up in the air about comments... In this case given that this is my personal site I'm not sure how much I want other people leaving their mark on it, if you know what I mean...

I'll have a think on it more though, maybe try out Disqus for a while...

jwegan
To me the color scheme seems a bit ugly, but others seem to like the site so it might just be me. What I find ugly is the green on gray. Changing either the green or the gray would make the site look better in my opinion.
aarongough
Are you referring in particular to the light green links or the bright green headings? I definitely think there's room for tweaking..
jwegan
Yes. I'm not a designer, but maybe you could try experimenting with blue headers/links and see how that looks?
aarongough
It's always worth a shot. Blue doesn't generally stand out against gray too well though. I appreciate the feedback! I'll play with some options.