I had been toying with a template somewhat similar to this design since the summer of 2011 but never had the time to actually get it release ready. I decided on first of June of 2012 that I would sit down and get everything ship shape and ready to deploy. What spurred this change? Getting a job at Trinovus e-banking and realizing the real world is about to begin… Regardless, the end result looks rather nice. The site is designed to handle these goals:

• Be my personal home page and link me directly to everything I am interested in on the web (I love lightboxes)
• Give me a way to express my artistic side to the fullest
• Be the gateway between what I’ve done and the world (I deleted my Facebook out of spite for what that company has become)
• Be the primary tool I use to document my life after college
• Be the primary way people can discover or contact me

However, there’s a bit more to it than that. Under the wordpress framework, I setup that wordpress install to be capable of multi-site. One of my goals was to use this infrastructure to gather friends and like-minded individuals to this hosting package and utilize it as a set of professional blogs. The hosting package I used is from Dreamhost. They provide very high quality hosting packages for those who value convenience over spending days tweaking settings to get everything just right (instead its just an hour or two of tweaking). With enough traffic / individuals interested in joining the Locusnet, I will be upgrading the package as needed (private VPS anyone?). Those interested in joining this package should drop me a line at loualrid@gmail.com or simply just add a comment to this portfolio item.

For those who are interested, I may or may not be willing to build sites for you. It mostly depends on the site concept and what you’re asking for. For others simply looking for a web designer / developer for contract work, the above also applies (I do work full-time). Regardless, get in contact with me in some way if you want to.