New portfolio website

My portfolio website has gone through a long process of refinement over the past year. During the first two weeks, I produced the third major revision of my portfolio site. Each of these major versions has also been the product of a thousand minor tweaks, additions and adjustments.
Design Lab: This work makes a good example of 'Design Lab' working practices. I came up with a 'wish-list' of functions I wanted in the site, including a subtle but interesting layout which would let the work retain prominence, a system which would allow me to update the site easily (otherwise I never would!) and for each page to be accessible from every other.

Version 1: built on Indexhibit. fitted the above criteria. A friend called it 'cheerily spartan'. However, I felt that the quirkiness of the layouts distracted from the work, the CMS was actually quite a pain to use, and to have every page accessible from every other required a text-navigation, which was not an ideal way of browsing visual work.


Version 2: hand-coded. I decided that a slideshow which fills the window would look ace, and HTML & CSS weren't that hard to use, so I could just update it myself and not have to deal with Indexhibit's buggy image resizing. I made something with lots of Javascript which got out of hand both visually (lots of fade-effect panels looked too busy) and in technical complexity (I couldn't follow how it worked anymore!)
Examples: 1 2 3 4


Version 3: built using Cargo Collective. I'm extremely pleased with how this version of my site has turned out. I intend to keep it. A gridded thumbnail navigation visually introduces projects which can contain text, static images, slideshows, video and anything else. Every page can be reached from every other, visually through the thumbnail grid at the bottom of every page, or via a text menu. The layouts are subtle and don't interfere with presenting work.