Gather round children while I explain why I’ve got an online presence at all.

Draw! My first and biggest passion is drawing. That’s what I did for the better part of my adolescent life. I would spend hours upon hours sketching away, trying to perfect that one drawing. Summers on end where I would wake up and spend 10-15 hours over my desk sketching and painting and learning a new technique.

I haven’t done that in a very long time. Day in day out, Draw! Draw! Draw! I can attribute that to one and only reason, the web. I’ve already spoken about how I got into learning how to design, but why did I bother with the computer at all in the first place? The main and only reason at the time was I wanted to computer colour my work. It seemed like the right thing to do I guess.

Inbetween all of this the web however had a strange allure on me. ‘Let’s get a website, everyone seems to have one, why not me? You’ve got a reason to be online, it’ll be great.’

Part of me wants to go back to that poor bastard and tell him to stop these stupid ideas and get back down to the business of drawing, because I was soo naive at how hard it can actually be. Of course if I did that, well then life at work wouldn’t be quite as interesting, and I wouldn’t be able to do a great deal of things that I can to enhance my drawings, plus I wouldn’t have 3 different drawings styles that I do now. It all kind of works out in the end I guess, just takes that much longer with, story of my life actually. I always get there, it just takes me 3 times as long, and sometimes the train has passed.

Therefore that effort has not been lost, it’s hidden there, it’s just a matter of sitting down and getting drawing again. Emmortel provides me with the framework set up for quick and easy updates, I’m ready to tackle the first reason I decided to get online. The origins of Broken Kode can be mapped back to providing an easy way to update my portfolio site with news updates. It’s spiralled into oh so much more, and I didn’t expect that, but I’m really glad for it.

Is this the first time I’ve got a portfolio online? No hardly, but it is the first time where updating the site, won’t be an issue. It won’t be a chore, just a 3 minute job, with no coding involved at all. It’s a base for me to start.

Design. In creating Emmortel I had to think about several things. The main issue was whether or not to go for Flash versus something HTML/CSS pure. I ended up with a hybrid as they both have their advantages and disadvantages. With Flash you’ve got control over images, functions, sound (coming soon I hope), movement, etc. It’s a great little tool, if used wisely. Strangely it’s the Flash part of the site that I’m least happy with, but I’m in no rush. I’ll be tweaking that file for sure, adding better interactivity and functionality. I just need to learn how.

In sorting out my Flash side of things, I ran into MANY problems. My knight in shining armour was Scotty, (his website can be found here: Gertdesign ). Scotty you sir ROCK!

I have optimised the images as much as they will go, and the css file runs at a whopping 3k which I’m pretty happy with, so hopefully it’s not an arduous task to load the site.

1024 versus 800 I’ve chosen my path on this particular war. This portfolio website is meant to be a showcase of art and design, it’s not meant to be seen at such as small screen, and honestly I’m not targeting people who are still with an 800 screen. The majority (and by majority I’m talking about 80%) will be able to view the website as it was intended to. I apologise to those still on 800 screens, but alas I believe it’s time to chuck out that dusty old monitor (do they still make 800x600s?)

So now when I get my business cards made, I’ll have:

Words | www.brokenkode.com Pictures | www.emmortel.com