New Year, New Look, New Goals

A few months ago, I set a goal to launch my refreshed personal website at MarkPraschan.com by January 1st. With only a few hours to spare, I achieved that goal.

MarkPraschan.com is my new home online and is one of my favorite projects I’ve worked on. Here’s why.

Site Purpose

I’ve had a personal website for years, but have never established a very clear purpose for it. That ends today.

I plan to use this site for the following purposes:

  1. To briefly answer anyone wondering “who is Mark Praschan?”
  2. To act as a sandbox where I can test and publish new ideas
  3. To occasionally provide interesting and/or helpful content related to e-commerce, web design, etc.

Site Design

This site is running on WordPress using an almost completely custom theme based on the Gutenberg Starter Theme by WordPress themselves.

I set out to create something clean, simple, and professional. Here are a few specifics…

Layout / Typography

I tweaked that starter theme pretty significantly so it constantly scales font-size and content width based on the viewer’s browser width (using things like max-width: calc(300px + 25vw) for you fellow CSS nerds out there).

I did this to minimize the number of times the website “snaps” to a different layout and also to help ensure that text is always super easy-to-read regardless of device.

The Details

This site’s primary color is a high-energy, high-contrast yellow-orange. Having grown up in a University of Michigan household, it’s also one of my favorite colors.

I’ve grown tired of text links that all look the same (bright blue with a simple underline) so I decided to take a different approach for this site. I adopted a technique similar to the one used by the fine folks over at Kinsta. It takes advantage of CSS3 backgrounds and animations and (hopefully) leads to a good user experience.

Font Awesome is awesome. I love that I can tap into a library of 1,400+ free icons whenever I need them. I use the library on this site even for simple things like the Twitter and Facebook icons in the site menu.

What’s Next

Who knows?! I’ve really enjoyed creating this first version of my Gutenberg-friendly WordPress theme nearly from scratch. I’m sure I’ll keep tweaking over the coming weeks and months.

What do you think?

Let me know here or on Twitter what you think of the site design. I’d love to connect if you have any feedback.