Personal Profile Site

Overheal

http://joncharron.info

Comments, suggestions?

I just took an online version of a Tech Writing class and one of the projects involved making a Printed Resume, a Web (LinkedIn) resume, and a "Special medium" resume. Not wanting to be a boring tit, I chose to build a website, which also came in handy because our other project for the course was create an article documenting steps on how to use Adobe Software, since the school just paid for unlimited access - so I doubled up and documented how to get a website launched.

Created with Muse in CC. Didn't have access to any prefab themes, just widgets. The "Boss" buttons on the homepage I had to make myself and make work, did borrow a couple open license iconography for that on the web, and open license fonts. Don't know how to force a new window popup for my LinkedIn profile or Resume download, but those would be nice features to nab. As for the "rhetorical situation," this is mainly for recruiters to look up about me, in addition to information I'd provide during a normal application.

What were your first impressions? What would you change? What works?

Overheal

Anyone? Good and bad welcome. It might be my first stab at a site but if it sucks I want to know now and think about amending it

Fenster

It looks like you just sliced up a graphic file in some Adobe tool:

• The code appears to be entirely computer-generated.
• Only some icons have a hover effect.
• Rather than use actual text, you generated the text in Photoshop or something, and popped it in. That's bad for any kind of usability.
• Site size is fixed. There's no responsiveness, so it's going to look like crap pretty much everywhere.
• The nav menu is annoying, since the text is in slightlyyyyy different places in each item.
• Having both a top nav menu and big nav icons is pointlessly redundant. Pick one or the other.

The whole site smacks of something you built using WYSIWYG tools and drop-ins.

tricky D

As alluded to above the rule of thumb is use text for text unless you have a good reason to put it in a graphic. This applies here to just about all text on the site.

I'd strongly advise you to change the rasterised font, it looks very poor, outdated and amateurish.

Make your logo image a link back to the homepage and move home in the nav to the left where people expect it.

Take the LinkedIn link out of the nav bar and use a LinkedIn branded image.

The slider nav buttons have poor contrast and could be easily missed. Contrast is your friend, use it more and avoid grey on grey - it sucks for readability.

Try to make your email addresses links in your resumé pdf and consider having other formats than just a pdf ie. .html and .doc.

Contact page, up the contrast as above and you have the option to use the email address validation capabilities in html5 ie add type="email" to that input field. There is some sort of validation gong on but it's not as intuitive as it would be if you used the type method. Provide a separate form sent page without the form elements. With the form still there and the missable (contrast again) 'from received', it could be confusing.

Get a proper 404 page with sitemap.

Dump the meta keywords on the homepage and add meta descriptions and og tags to all the other pages.

The site is not a Responsive Design ie. will not adjust gracefully on smaller devices. This is must these days. If your site builder can't do that, dump it and use something else. Actually just dump whatever site builder you are using full stop, it's not cutting the mustard at all, by all appearances. There are plenty of free responsive templates which will do the trick.

gl/hth