- Date: September 20, 2013
The website that you are currently looking at has gone through many different permutations over the years as I have grown and shifted into my own career. It began as a graduate student blog hosted on WordPress.com. My first post was back on March 1st, 2013 and announced an upcoming conference presentation. Version 1 of the site had a rust-colored theme and catalogued “the early years” of my graduate student work and research in Hokkaido, Japan.
As I neared filing the dissertation, I transferred the website to my own domain (https://www.cmspiker.com) on April 15, 2015 and completely revamped the layout of the website through a fresh port of WordPress. The new design (Version 2) rendered my C.V. into a visual model and this formed the landing page for the website. The layout was bold and colorful and captured the excitement of embarking on my first two jobs in Minnesota at St. Olaf College and St. Catherine University. Maybe the color was helping me stave off the cold winters!
Version 3 of the website is a new development. I wanted something that was snappier in terms of loading times, but that maintained a fresh and flat look. This layout is a horizontal-scrolling one-page layout. I also wanted to incorporate color in bold new ways, which I do through my vector illustrations created through Assembly, an app that one of my students introduced me to this past winter. The website continues to serve as a visual and online C.V., but also takes steps to frame and foreground my current and ongoing research projects as well as renovate individual portfolio pages to better showcase the work being done.
We will see what Version 4 will bring!
