Summary

I wanted a one stop shop for someone that wanted to get to know who I was. But, I also wanted a place where I could put into practice certain web development concepts such as SEO, SEM, Feature A/B Testing, and novel web design concepts such as my blog.

Creating the Website Itself

The website's design does come from a template I found online however, in order to customize it for my needs I did have to delve quite deep into the css and javascript.

SEO & SEM

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. I first decided to try my hand at SEO to see how well I could do for free. I had to create a sitemap.xml that quite literally was a map of the pages on this website. After submitting my sitemap to Google Search Console I had to make sure that all my pages had good meta tags so that Google's web crawlers could optimally rank my pages. In the end I would say I did a pretty good job considering that if you search my full name my portfolio comes up in the top 5 links and a good description) SEM on the other hand is a project that I have dabbled a little bit into however, I am leaving it for a time when I actually have something I deem worthy of advertising.

A/B Testing

I was reading a medium article from Netflix's TechBlog that absolutely inspired my interest into A/B testing. The way it portrayed A/B testing as a democratic means of making product decisions resonated with me quite deeply. And, so I went exploring A/B testing and how I could implement it in my own way. That is how I found my way to Google Optimize. Since I was already using Google Analytics and had the gtag.js script on my page supplementing it with a Google Optimize one made the most sense, on top of the fact that Google Optimize is also probably the easiest way to get A/B testing up and running.

My Blog

My blog is a little project I am quite proud of. I knew that at some point I want to communicate my ideas/knowledge I have learned over the years in some sort of compilation. However, I know that a tradition blog would've been too restrictive in its format; I like my notes to be on a blank page and handwritten so that I can organize concepts both visually and spacially. The last impetus for this project was that our thoughts are not permanent. They are ever changing and so a workflow needs to be in place that makes it as seamless to go from idea to publication.