I’m excited to announce that I have launched a redesign of my business/portfolio site Black Ant Media. I started in on a redesign about a year ago and never finished it. They say if you’re too busy to update your own site, that’s a good thing. But when you’re in the business of selling your supposed expert services, not having any work to view is an embarrassment.
I had been wanting to play with MooTools for a while now, so I took the opportunity to use it on this redesign. I came away from the experience feeling like PHP is to jQuery (everyone structures their code differently) as Rails is to MooTools (established OO patterns that pretty much everyone follows). The MooTools Fx classes offer some of the smoothest animations I’ve come across. There is still much I want to learn about this framework, but I’m really impressed so far.
I’m using the lightweight (no database) Stacey CMS for the portfolio. Since this is a single-page site, I decided to load all of the project information dynamically from Stacey using AJAX calls and fetching JSON data.
I had a fun time working on the contact form as well. For WebKit browsers, the form flips around when you submit it turning your message into an envelope that gets dropped into a slot. On the server side, I use Akismet to check for spam submissions. Please send me a message if you’d like to try it out.
I few other buzzwords I incorporated: HTML5, Sass, TypeKit, Modernizr, hCard microformat, and parallax background scrolling.
I still have a bunch of cleanup/refactoring to do and I need to make a mobile version, but I’m really pleased with how it has turned out so far.
Oh, and all of the code lives in public Github repo if you want to check it out. Hit me up on Twitter with any questions or feedback.
