Gordon Potter's Portfolio

Gordon Potter's Portfolio
  • Isilon Systems
  • Tapintu Inc.
  • Trimergence
  • Lockdown Networks
  • George Fearing For Congress
  • Colin Spring
  • murdersilence.com
  • Global Seepej Records
  • At The Spine
  • Gordon Potter's Portfolio

About The Portfolio

Built a dynamic portfolio website to showcase various web projects and design samples.

Requirements:

  • Provide convenient and condensed navigation.
  • Make site dynamic but exstensible to accomodate a variety of project samples and customizable folder organization.
  • Clean and simple.

Date:

Autumn 2009

Gordon Potter's Portfolio Application Gordon Potter's Portfolio Application

This project required a hybrid between custom hand rolled HTML and dynamic content management. To provide maxmimum flexibilty I decided to deploy this site in PHP using the Code Igniter PHP framework. The site design is intended to provide a simple model view controll design structure for future customization of portfolio site's features.

A design goal of this project was to build something lightweight, portable and relatively efficient to update by a technical user. I wanted the advantage of Model View Controller without a heavy CMS architecture getting in the way. Currently the portfolio application does not connect to a database. For the time being I dedcided to implement some simple, statically coded data objects in the model tier. As the needs of the portfolio application grow I will refactor the model tier into a more formal system. But for now it works. The "data" of the application cleanly sits in the model tier and the Controller and View have a formal relationship to that model tier. If I decide to implement a database I can. Currently I am curious to see what can be built without a database. Perhaps, a hashmap or some simple data structure will suffice. I am intrigued by the No SQL movement and am interested to see what will be possible without a heavy database tier in the application architecture.

The portfolio uses jQuery and css to provide a multi-faceted navigation interface including the a sliding scroll content container, a carousel menu of thumbnails, and lightbox type functionality to display design comps.