Portfolio featured on "Weekly 30 Inspirational Websites"

My portfolio is part of the current "Weekly 30 Inspirational Websites" on the Design Your Way blog! Very exciting - I always love great feedback like this, just makes all the hard work on the site worth it. Thank you for including my site to Design Your Way!

If you did not find my blog through my online portfolio, you can check it out here and see for yourself.

Marian Bantjes

Yesterday I was introduced to the work of Marian Bantjes and wow, can you say attention to detail. She did an amazing die-cut poster for the Academy for Educational Development (AED) and some very neat typography pieces using...sugar!


I love typography and letter shapes, so her work makes for some great inspiration. Enjoy!

Portfolio Featured on "CSS Based"

My online portfolio is featured on CSS Based. I am very excited to have been selected to be in their gallery. I had to laugh when I first saw my site up there, because they chose the "Artsy" style of the site for the screen shot, which is my favorite too!

It's a good feeling to get positive feedback, after putting so much work into the structuring, designing and coding of the site. All the more motivation to get started on a new style to design for the portfolio... I am thinking maybe a winter theme, since it's getting colder; we'll see.

Painting: "Coit Tower"

This is an acrylic painting I just finished. It depicts the view from Lombard Street down toward Coit Tower in San Francisco. A recent trip to the beautiful city inspired this painting. It was done on a 16"x20" stretched canvas and is a gift to my future parents-in-law.

Tracking Site Visitor Traffic

Now that the portfolio is up and running, I've started thinking about implementing a tracking system to see how site visitors interact with my portfolio. I was very much focused on trying to create a user-friendly experience, and as if it was meant to be, I came across a great post today about different ways to track traffic.

I knew about Google Analytics of course, but I didn't realize you could map where on the page people click or how long they look at a particular section. After checking out a few of the suggested tools, it seems that Google will still be the best option for me.

There were a few tracking tools that I would not consider for most of my projects (but for some, very few, it might be a good option). I am not a big fan of intrusive traffic analysis, such as pop-up surveys. Also, while I can see how recording every move the user makes on flash video will tell you a lot about how one interacts with your page, but it just seems like that should only be utilized if the user agrees to it.

I'll have to read up a little more on the topic, but I hope to add the tracking system very soon.