Moving Forward with Portfolio Homepage

I’m finally moving forward on the homepage for my porfolio.  Here’s what the current Mock-up looks like:

The frame is composed of very small tiled images, so text I turned into an image to preserve the effects, and two Flash elements.   Here’s a link to play with the left menu Flash Element:

Link (Click away, but it’s not connected to anything yet.) I will do a a couple of little Javascript rollovers for the Contact me link and the link back to omarissister.com.  I could do the same thing for the Flash elements, but I’m a little worried about responsiveness and I can make the elements look “slicker” in Flash.  I’m still not happy with middle, but I have the text I want convey there as a place holder.

I decided not to fight my innate style and go with the colorful construction paper/childlike arts and craft look.  I suppose, I really would like to design websites that cater to the young and folks that like cute rather than design sterile looking “businessy” website. Still, though, I don’t want to be pigeon-holed.

After this, I need to redo my translation website into something with more punch, pink, and playfulness.  I also need to accommodates my scanlations.  It would be nice if I made an embedded reader so folks can’t easily download and then upload my work without my permission.  Plus, it will be easier for the folks that visit my website.

Sigh … I’ve got a lot of work to do.  But it should be all down hill with respect to my portfolio once I get the frame into HTML/CSS.  Because the site will be modular, I can then just plug in the different elements I’ve already made.

Fireworks has been a great tool to Mock-up the websites and to create the graphic elements.  It has some nice file saving features that allowed me get the images into very small file sizes (some of them are less than 1KB!!!) while balancing image quality.  I like it for this purpose more than Photoshop.