Design Brief: Ruby Beginner blog

A brief summary of the business / site goals.

I would like to become professional Ruby on Rails developer. This site should show my enthusiasm about Ruby and hopefully provide solutions to other beginners with some of my past programming issues.

Link to site: http://rubybeginner.com/

The key users.

Me: This is my presentation as Ruby programmer. I would like to show my knowledge and enthusiasm here.

Visitor: Comes from Google search and looks for solution to particular programming issue.

Potential employer/client: Expects to find some basic information about myself. Page should show them that I really enjoy writing Ruby programs and it should server as entry point for future contact with potential clients.

Scenarios in which your app or site will be used.

Simple blog site showing solutions to particular Ruby programming challenges. Users should be able to see single post and also list of all posts (archive). There should be also one or two static pages, like About and maybe Contact me.

Design style guidelines to follow.

Minimalist, clean, calm.

@patrikbona Narrow in on who your primary audience is. For example for my site my primary audience is me. I have other people from designers coming to look me up to potential thoughtbot clients but I care more about making me happy first. Who is most important to you?

I keep telling people pretend your site is a person, how would you describe its personality? I think minimalist and calm are great words but I wouldn’t describe anyone I know as clean. Clean in an interface an mean a lot of things so I try to stay away from using that and use something more descriptive.

Hmm. I was thinking about this.

When I am thinking about my page as person, then I would replace clean with nice!

Nice as it looks nice. Nice as I want to have good feeling from my page.

And who is my primary audience? From myself, other beginners and potential clients I choose myself. I want to have good feeling from my site and then I will be pride to show it to someone else.

Ok, here are some sketches.

These are items which I want to have on page:

  • link to about page
  • link to pair with me page
  • maybe some about me box

On index page I want to have list of all posts. On post page I want to have post content. That’s all.

@kylefiedler what do you think about it?

Personally I like 3 and 4 the best.

@patrikbona I’ll ask about the image upload problem for now can you put them somewhere else and link to them here?

I’ve updated my previous post with my sketches…