Building in Public

I have decided to something a little different, something which over the course of the next few months will take this website from a basic WordPress installation to an all singing & dancing website all about me.

My name (as you may or may not know is Ed Henderson) and I have owned edhenderson.com for over 12 years now. This website has gone through many guises over the years, personal, work, Blog, holidays, videos and even cats. It has lain dormant (or untouched) for the last 7 years. The last update was to announce the birth of my first son Jack (21 November 2004). He turned 7 last month. Embarrassing I know, but like the old cobbler’s children have no shoes phenomena, my website has often been neglected.

Now I am a little bit older, a wee bit more experienced, had my finger in quite a few different pies, I wanted to take back my domain from the Internet wasteland and put it to some good.

I build websites for a living and I have found that while trying to find work, I am often asked for a Portfolio, examples of my work, something which I don’t have in one sensible place. Sometimes I am asked for design examples, sometimes development examples. I have also done a bit of speaking, writing & consultancy so its time to showcase my best asset. Me.

I intend to write about my new website, how I put it together, how I design it, build it, test it and look after it. Hopefully this may help someone else in a similar situation, someone who might be stuck and serve as a useful record of what happened and why. I won’t get everything right first time but thats part of the fun?

At the moment, the only thing this website consists of is a vanilla install of WordPress 3.2.1 and is hosted by Simplehelix. The rough plan is to configure WordPress, get some plugins installed, then: