Why I Created nawright.com
My initial idea for this website was to simply create a virtual business card, something I can use to market myself to future employers. But as I was building it, I came to the realization It could be much more than that. I wanted an area where I can express myself creatively and a website is the perfect medium for this. I’m not restricted by some word count, file size or some other seemingly arbitrary rule on found on a platform’s terms of service. This is what motivated me to build past the index page of this site. Hopefully, as time goes on, I can keep growing my website to share my projects both professional and creative with the world.
Design
I wanted to design this site with a very specific philosophy: make it simple and effective. Many portfolios I’ve seen either make it hard to find information that you want people to know or are cluttered with unnecessary features that slow down page loading. I like to think my homepage is effective because it clearly shows what visitors want to know and guides them to where they can learn more about me. This philosophy also influenced the style of my website. Although it’s fairly simple, just text and solid colors, I feel it has a modern look and works well for a business card–style site. This style works especially well for the mobile environment which I predict most people will be viewing the website on.
Tools Used
For this website I decided to go with Astro Blog because it allows me to build fast, modern websites with minimal JavaScript, supports multiple frontend frameworks like React (which I didn’t use) and makes it easy to create component-based pages while keeping performance high. Blog posts such as these are written in Markdown, which I use to create content that is automatically published to the blog page. This website is mostly static so I felt it was the right tool for the job. Additionally, I used Vercel to host this website which makes updating this website is as simple as pushing to Github.
Future of this Website
I have a lot of things in store for nawright.com. As of the posting of this blog I’m building out my Other page where I plan to add various creative works like music and level design concepts for Counter Strike. Thanks for reading and feel free to check out more of my website.
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity”
— Carl Jung