My personal website has gone through many different iterations, which now serve to highlight some of my web design experience.
Current site
![Current site](/assets/images/bennorris-com.png)
As I decided to go independent as a mobile app consultant, I made some adjustments to my websites. I moved my primary site to bennorris.com, and created seperate sites for focused content that would also link back to my main site.
So now I have authenticcompassion.com, mentalworkhealth.org, sketchnotable.com, and gospelsketcher.org each as dedicated sites.
bennorris.org
![bennorris.org](/assets/images/bennorris-org.png)
After a couple years away, I came back to GitHub Pages and consolidated all of my disperate sites into a single site: bennorris.org. I chose a theme I liked (Basically Basic by Michael Rose), and made some tweaks.
Micro.blog
![Micro.blog](/assets/images/micro-blog.jpeg)
The vision of Micro.blog resonates strongly with me, and I am enjoying supporting them and participating in the humane community they have created. I tweaked the design and templates of my site there, notably adding support for light and dark modes.
Static blog
![Static blog](/assets/images/old-blog.png)
This served as my main website, including blog and microblog, from the middle of 2016 until the middle of 2018 when I moved to Micro.blog. I hosted the site using GitHub Pages and configured it to support writing and publishing from mobile devices.
I started with an open-source design, and then tweaked everything to have the CSS exactly how I wanted. After a couple years, I found that I spent too much time tweaking the design and wanted to spend more time actually writing.
Flat design
![Flat design](/assets/images/flat.png)
At the time that I created the sketchbook design (2013), skeuomorphic design was falling out of fashion, and the trend was flat design. I wanted to show that I was aware of this and was able to do both styles, and so I created an alternate design for the same site that users could toggle between.
Sketchbook design
![Sketchbook design](/assets/images/sketchbook.jpeg)
This was my first website to design every part of it alone from scratch. In the middle of 2013 when I did this, I was using sketchbooks constantly and decided to make the design skeuomorphic and to show off my new CSS skills. It was a blast to make.
Wordpress
![Wordpress](/assets/images/wordpress.png)
My first website was created in Wordpress. The main purpose was to share the sketchnotes that I was starting to create at the time.