drbexl is a site built upon WordPress, and contains personal information, including my employment history, but also where I blog and link to any number of things that I find interesting, want to support, or just generally want to witter (and Twitter) on about. There’s no set schedule for updating, and it functions largely as a scrapbook as & when I find material that I want to highlight or reflect upon:
View https://drbexl.co.uk
As I have built up my web design skills, I thought it was worth building up a portfolio of work, attracting attention from those who will be interested in my skills, particularly my content writing and information architecture skills, once the the PhD was completed.I wanted something contemporary and clean looking, whilst providing useful information.
Visit: http://www.mydesigna.co.uk
Purpose of this blog, first created November 2008:
Built using Google Blogger. Still experimenting with new widgets, as I combine using this software with Google Blogger.
Visit: http://drbexl.blogspot.com/
Once I knew that I was leaving the University of Manchester, and started making plans for ‘Round the World’ travels, I decided to jump into the world of ‘blogging’. This site was the one that first came up on ‘Googling’ ‘travelblog’, and seemed to fit the purpose. I have religiously updated it on my travels, although the writing is very rough in form, and the images have not been particularly carefully chosen!
The primary audience of the site was myself – it was designed as a record for my own memories, back-up storage of images, and possibly to provide raw material for travel writing at some point.
The secondary audience of the site was my friends and family as with limited (aka internet cafe) access to the internet I wanted to be able to contact many people at once, and have them know that I was safe, plus give them some insight into what I was doing/seeing and learning!
The joy of updating the site has disappeared somewhat, and my ‘big travels’ come to an end in November 2008, so I plan to do some quick entries (all the photos are on, which is all most people are interested in, but be good to have some brief text), and then bring it to a close!
Personal pages are the ideal place to experiment with different techniques, colours, and generally ‘play’, although I still want my pages to look good, be informational about me, easy to navigate, and reasonably fast loading.
Hosted by freenetname (now madasafish), my ISP, comes with 100MB of hosting. In November 2008 I gave my site (in existence since 1998) a quick makeover to make it look a bit fresher, more relevant, and removed many of the space-hogging photos. The initial driver for putting up the site was to provide photos for friends and family scattered across the UK/around the world, but with blogs and Facebook this has become less necessary, and I will remove all aside from a small selection of images (reducing some privacy issues)
The site is designed to provide:
With each version of the site (first launched in 1997), I maintain a similar colour theme throughout, and there’s rarely a need to start from scratch at any point. I re-use information where necessary, restructure according to my new plans, and add whatever my current interests are. In January 2009, to go with my new, more-positive outlook on life, I added a stronger purple-ness to the site!
The site is built with Dreamweaver, using a table structure (will shortly be re-constructed using CSS), and editable regions within a template.
See: http://www.bex-lewis.co.uk
