A blog dedicated to my personal website.
This blog is exactly what the title says it is: a shout out to my personal website. For a little bit now, I have had my portfolio living on one website (hosted by Adobe) and my blog living on another (hosted by Squarespace). After eating lots of popcorn and streaming lots of Gossip Girl, I have finally merged all things “Maris” into one website: www.mariswhitley.com. And there are hopefully more cool things in store for the future of my site.
My perfectionist side has been annoyed about the lack of unification between my websites and personal content for a while. I would honestly think about it before going to bed a lot, but with a busy senior year, I just could not seem to get around to fixing the laundry list of changes I had for my website. It felt like there were not enough hours in the day. However, this month I finally got to it, and one of the main motivators was applying for jobs. I knew I wanted everything to be unified and look coordinated, so it would be a good reflection of myself.
The first thing that needed to change about my website were the colors; they did not match my personal brand at all. In my Intro to Graphic Design class at UNC, one of our projects was to create our own personal branding logo and color palette. I ended up really loving what I created, so I incorporated it into my cover-letterhead, and I knew I wanted to do the same with my website. Now, instead of the random colors that were on the site, I have incorporated the colors in my logo as my palette on the website, which in my opinion, is the most important part of branding.
Currently, I am using Squarespace to host my site. At first, I thought about building my own website via the HTML and CSS I have learned, so I could have the most freedom with how I structure my content. However, from experience, building a website from scratch and maintaining its code can be very time consuming, and I decided that at this point in my life, I could better dedicate my time to other things (such as creating more content and ideas to actually go on my website).
That being said, I have actually started to enjoy Squarespace’s interface, and after using some other CMS (content management system) programs in classes of mine, I have a new respect for Squarespace, even though there are some things I wish I could change with how it works. Now that I have everything unified, I am excited to see what other elements I can add to my website to make it go beyond just a home for my blog and my portfolio. Squarespace actually has very popular E-Commerce tools that can help someone build their own personal shop. This is something I have honestly wanted to set up for a while to possibly sell some of my art, so I hope that this gives me some new motivation.
Who knows what the future of my personal website holds, but I am excited to finally have a happy and branded home for all of my creations and to keep it active and updated throughout my life.