Today marks the soft-launch of the new charlesrubinoff.com. Who knew it’d be so difficult to find time to work on my website amid the rigors of graduate school? Well, actually, I did.

I started this project toward the end of Summer semester. Oh, what a simpler time…three months ago.  I enjoyed a brief respite from classwork between semesters, but also committed myself the build of a completely redesigned and re-structured website to showcase my work, give some organization to my writing, and aid in the journey to the next step of my career. First, let’s get an idea of what I was working with in the 2008-launched version 1.0 of charlesrubinoff.com.

My old site was, in some ways, off to a good start.  It had a blog section powered by WordPress which featured a custom theme made to match the look and feel of the rest of the site.  And with that out of the way, the bad news: the rest of my site — the front page, the static pages, the portfolio — was an anachronistic assemblage of hand-written code (but no tables!) that looked pretty on the surface, but made updates a chore.

In the time between building my old site and this new version, I’ve had much experience in working with the content management system WordPress. I love how it makes both development and maintenance a snap and knew I wanted it to serve as a platform for my new site. Despite how hectic my schedule has been lately, I knew if I follow a logical game plan on this site build, development time would be minimized. So that’s exactly what I did, from site planning to wireframes to Photoshop comps to coding to troubleshooting. Then after a little bit here and there, a hour here and a couple hours there, my site came together. I certainly made a few feature changes and design tweaks along the way; sometimes I have to remind myself to not let my desire for whiz-bang effects trump good design sense.

When it comes to personal portfolio-type sites, I believe in simple, elegant design that doesn’t get in the way of letting the work speak for itself. Although I am not seeking another position as primarily a graphic designer or web developer, I maintain this philosophy in my professional website. The purpose of the website is to showcase my grasp of the web, which includes a strong background in design and development, but focuses on online brand marketing and digital media strategy as a whole. I love the dynamism of our changing media landscape and the challenge of increasing brand awareness and identity through it.  I’ve been fortunate  enough to work with ventures and causes I can enthusiastically get behind, and I seek to continue that passion in my work.