Conánn FitzPatrick

Update: Written in early 2004 this page is painfully out of date. Although maintained a website in some form with a regular inconsistency since 1998. This was my first attempt at larger more personal, less portfolio driven site.

Getting here:

Creating a personal website is an interesting task, filled with questions and problems. Build it and they will come was the mantra back in 1999 when I started building my first site. So I went out and bought the Adobe web suite and started hammering away with grids and tables trying to make something that would stand out from the crowd and make the world realize that they needed my services to make their lives complete. I trolled away humped over the keyboard for weeks before coming up with the “killer design”.

My homepage! with four hovering pills that would squish oddly when the masses would roll over them. Home, About, Contact and Work, cool! “Home”, just needed to be the buttons! “About”, better write some text to explain how fantastic I am. “Contact”, that should be easy! “Work”, the showcase of my work, the sell, the why. Who cares! I have a site! I have a site yeahwow! The only problem was I did not have any work, not a damn thing to show, no content, nothing to show for ten years working in animation. I certainly was not going to let that stop me. I got busy scanning whatever I could find and patched together six or seven pieces and lashed together some new ones in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Amazingly enough I did get a couple of jobs out of it, bought flash 4 and made a new site with Flash, tables and frames and every scrap of an image I could find, 170 odd pages of scrapbook images and a background like old English mustard, which looked fine as long as you where not using netscape or anything other then Explorer 5 on a big colour correct monitor. But I had a splash page and all pro-looking sites must have one of them.

The next one had a splash page too! This one had to be the biz, I pared down the number of images and made a flash only deal with 3d buttons, stereophonic sound and a supper flash loader which worked great and reminding me every time I looked at it just how long it took to see anything. Even on broadband it was a beast, 1.6mb of unnecessary pulp to smooth over the fact that I was insecure about my own work. Now not only did I make excuses about the work but now I had to make excuses about the way they where presented. I ended up creating an images directory so when I had to show someone an example of my work I would just send them a link to an image. Not pretty not flashy but it got the work across with no questions. But it did highlight that things needed a rethink.

Starting over

It is really easy to see when something is wrong, but knowing what needs to be fixed is very different. I knew I no longer had a web page but a web space. I liked the ease of sharing new images with a simple upload and link, though organizing and sharing was not that easy. But what was most important was that the sloppiness of the presentation or lack of presentation allowed me to just show my work. After all it’s my work and no matter how much I try to make it look like someone else did it, it is still just my work. This freed me up to ask myself the simple questions.

Who? Who am I trying to please? I get my fair share of hits from anonymous randoms who take a good look around, go on their merry way, and very occasionally send a note which is always exciting; and for that I would like to make the pages more interesting, informative accessible.

My most useful hits are the ones I direct my self, pointing people to examples of my work. But unlike the blind links of the old images directory, I want to direct them to something that invites further exploration in a more understated manor.

Most importantly it’s for me! I want a place to store my stuff so when I need it I can find it. A homepage that has all the links I need, and information I find interesting.

What? What is the site about? Well it’s about the work, or is it, the work is here. Structured in a way that I hope makes it easy to look at and find. But what is the point in having a homepage if it’s not my homepage? So I am making the first page of the site the first thing I see when I go on the internet. Bookmarks I use most are there along with stuff I find along the way. For this purpose I have inserted code from Blogger.com into the main content so when I see something interesting I can write a note to self.

Where? When I started designing this site I figured the browser wars where over and less and less people are using Mac’s so I could get down to the same sloppy table, frame, Flash layouts I had used before, and just make something that worked in Internet Explorer. I had also moved back to Ireland which has the worst communications infrastructure in the developed world just behind Peru though I think they just passed us out. So it had to be fast, bandwidth matters! No Flashy stuff.

Why? The old site was just old, there was nothing new about it. It was also slow and slow is old. I had no good way of sharing my work, and no good way of organizing my stuff. I dreaded creating a website and loathed the amount of time they take.

When? Now! And the future (not Buck Rodgers future, but tomorrow)! I had to look at ways that would make updating the pages easy, enjoyable and painless. Blogger solved that question. I had read a few blogs and thought hmm that’s interesting but its no closer to what I want to do then 3D animated buttons and stereophonic sound are. But the method does make absolute sense. If I wanted to I could take a picture on a phone and upload it to my site without ever turning on a computer. Now that is ease of use!

All this got me no closer to a having a website then buying the Adobe suite did in 1999 but I was getting a sense of what I wanted to achieve. I got down to doing my homework and after some time I kept finding the same interesting idea. “Write once, design many”. As an artist I care about how the information looks, but most importantly I get bored with how it looks and want to change it. Often! As I looked at different design sites Jeffrey Zeldman’s name kept popping up and his book “designing with web standards”. XHTML for structure and Cascading Style Sheets for presentation! Great! What does it mean? Well for me it means that with any luck I will never have to recreate the content for my pages just because I want to change how they look. Very exciting stuff indeed! Well not really but it was a way if nothing else. The byproduct of which is that if someone was not on Internet Explorer on Windows they could still see the pages the way I wanted them or at the very least could see the content regardless of how old or new fangled their web device is.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s book is a very entertaining read and very good gateway into the world of web standards. His website and the A List Apart website to which he contributes have been invaluable to me in creating these pages.

So what is this site about? I still don’t know! My inner monologue tells me that I should have things that are interesting and useful to other people, like examples of how I do my work, Discussions on books, political debate, journal entries like that blogger dude! But when I think about it I feel uneasy. Why would anyone want to look at that? Do I really want that much work? No! Even thinking that someone might have read this far is a bit weird. So I am going to make out like I am home alone because we are all much more interesting when we think there is no one else there.