Greg Answer

Summary
I initially created this site to showcase my skills, provide links to my various social media accounts, and provide additional information about me. After receiving advice from a friend, I decided to make this site specifically to help potential employers discover why I’m an excellent candidate for a position as a web developer.
Last updated: June 14, 2017
Planning
Skills used: |
Agile
UX design
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Purpose | The purpose of this site is to demonstrate my exceptional web development skills and entice potential employers to hire me. |
Goals |
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Actions |
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User Personas
NOTE: The following User Personas are based on interviews that were done in an informal matter. To protect the identity of the individuals, stock images were used to represent them.

I like candidates who can:
- Market themselves
- Interview well
- Request a high salary

I work with people who can:
- Work in a team
- Write clean code
- Deliver on time
- Ask good questions

I hire people who are:
- Time sensitive
- Customer oriented
- Fast and flexible
Competition | Not only did I look at portfolios of people that I know, I did extensive Google searching for Web Developer and Web Designer portfolios as well as "How to" articles. I did a subjective evaluation of all the portfolios' and articles' strengths and weaknesses, then implemented what I felt works for my situation. |
Scope |
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Timeline | Ongoing. This is my most important online representation and I will not put a timeline on it. I will continuously seek feedback from various people inside and outside the industry. |
Designing
Skills used: |
UI sketching
Mobile design
Responsive design
Materialize CSS
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The initial design was focused on speed of delivery. "Get this done in 24 hours" was the design focus. I decided to use the Ruby on Rails web framework and Materialize CSS framework for the following reasons:
- I excel with these tools
- They give me the flexibility to modify sections of the site as needed
- I want to focus on delivering a final product as quickly as possible
Information Architecture

Database Architecture | At the moment, no database is required. I may consider adding a Blog model, but most likely I will just host my blog on my Medium account. |
Content Creation |
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Developing
Skills used: |
Ruby on Rails
CoffeeScript
HAML & SASS
HTML5 & CSS3
GitHub
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Behavior Driven Development (BDD)
I decided not to use behavior driven development for most of this process for 2 reasons:
- Other than the contact form, there is no complex part of the site that I'm worried about breaking
- I have no intention of working with a team for my personal site.
The limited testing I did:
- Basic link testing (header links, side nav links, footer links)
- Contact form testing
Review
The Review process involves the following steps:
- Spell-checking
- Browser/device testing
- Push to staging server
- Link testing
- Form testing
- User feedback
Changes Made
You can always change your plan, but only if you have one.
— Randy Pausch
It is great to have a plan, but it doesn't always go according to plan. Here are some of the change I made throughout the process:
- Removed brief "About Me" section from homepage in favor of giving more emphasis to projects
- Simplified list of skills into 3 phases of development
- Omit additional skills (I may add a "Skills" page that has a searchable list of all my skills
- Reduced the number of visible social networks. Focus on what employers would be looking for
Lessons Learned
Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.
— Twyla Tharp
- Determine your target audience no matter how small the project.
- Always research your direct and indirect competition (Web Developers and UX Designers)
- The full UX process should be applied to projects of all sizes
- Omit needless links. Try to use only 3-5 links per section
- Omit needless words. Try to cut sentences/paragraphs in half while retaining important information
Next Steps
- Add a few pictures of UI sketching for each project
- Add Additional links:
- "How and Why I Redesigned My Portfolio" Medium blog post for greganswer.com project
- Behance project page for each project
- Add site screenshots for each project
- Add social share buttons to each project page and the "About" page
- Add JavaScript transitions for different sections
- Add a list of programming books I've read to the "About" page