Ask HN: How can I improve my personal website
I'm a high school student developer looking for an internship. What can I do to improve my flow. What am I missing in terms of design? Writing?
The site is michaelfine.me
The site is michaelfine.me
The only issues I can point out is some HTML validation errors, mainly with header tags that don't match. I'd also rework the skills section to line up with the experience section.
The best advice I can give to you is to seek out some digital agencies and to send their Managing Directors or Creative Directors a quick email to run through who you are and whether they would be able to take you on board for a few projects. It's hard to get into some companies, but agencies tend t eat this kind of stuff up and they'd love to be able to give a young developer a chance to work on a real-world client. This will give you the only thing I feel is lacking with your site, and that is some real-world projects.
* The ruby icon doesn't match the rest
* the blue h1's are a little 2d. Try a webfont or a background image, use dribbble for inspiration: http://dribbble.com/shots/668114-Web-search-user-interface?l...
* I didn't even notice the navigation at the top. Same issue with the title font in the nav. Also there's more padding below the title than above.
* For the little squares under skills maybe you could put together something using a javascript graph library? Add something interactive to the page that also shows off your skills.
* You lose the page nav when you go to resume
* theres no need for projects to have its own page yet. You could move the projects to the home page and use anchor links in the nav,
* Perhaps you can add more to the header. "I'm X, I do this that the other I can do this for you I have worked here. These are my clients" You're work should stand out more than a 1 line introduction.
* You should definitely put a link to your github page on the front page.
* Might be worth commenting your CSS/HTML, my first thought is to always look to see if a developer is a good commenter!
Hope there's something helpful in there! I tend to go on a bit, especially when there's mismatched padding!
1. Your name isn't centered vertically
2. You need some white space between your subcategory headers and the content itself, between java [x] [x] [ ] [ ] [ ] and Frameworks/Libraries (know what I mean?)
3. Jquery is usually written jQuery.
4. I think the centering is kind of weird, the content being centered looks good, but I think your headers should maybe be left-aligned. (same with your experience descriptions)
5. I think your contact me button is, maybe take a look at glyphicons (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/base-css.html#icons)
Having more information than what you rate yourself out of 5 on a specific piece of tech might be good, I am not sure how you are planing to use this website as a resume or not, though, so may be irrelevant. Also not sure how you might incorporate that into your current design.
Other than that it looks good, good luck!
First thing i noticed and i always do hate this things is how good you are in some languages. Unfortunately that means nothing as you cant really tell me you are an expert in Ruby (4/5) Id recommend removing that and adding some concrete data why you are good at those. Perhaps the projects you have actually done.
Also the Ruby is not really the same as the other icons.
Some more tags in html would be good etc <meta property='og:locale' content='en_US'/> <meta property='og:title' content=''/> <meta property='og:description' content=''/> <meta property='og:url' content=''/> <meta property='og:site_name' content=''/> <meta property='og:type' content='website'/> ...
- The resume page is the only page without navigation.
- Maybe I just like footers, but... there's no footer. Not really "wrong" but, I expect it to be there.
- The header shifts a few pixels when you go from About back to the index.
- Personally, I prefer to see technical skills broken up on the resume like on your My Skills section. That is to say, have languages, tools, IDEs, split up. Not sure what industry standards there are though.
- If you get bored, throw some URL rewriting in to get rid of the .html on the pages, just for fun.
All in all, much better than most personal websites I see.
- The ruby logo doesn't get along with the others, try adding some gray to the carats or something alike.
- You are not using the same gray combination in the JS logo.
- The contact me button needs more space for the envelope.
- The resume page doesn't show the header.
Nevertheless, great work =)
It's clean and minimalist. I like it. But on the homepage, under "My Experience" the chunks of text look a little awkward. Try align left or justify (instead of "center") also, try consider using helvetica neue and other light fonts for some of your text. Otherwise, it looks very professional.
P.S. Have you considered freelancing via sites like Guru.com and eLance?