I’ve been trying to do better about working on my own site, which recently went under a complete redesign. I got tired of the old design, which was not optimized for search engines, nor was it easy to update or manage as it was based on old code that I kept recycling over the years and building on. So I decided to redesign it from the ground up, which was a slow project, being a designer, you would think it would be easy to design your own website, right? Wrong. Having yourself for a client is probably the worst client you can have.

Perpetual Redesign Hell

I spent the better part of 10 months redesigning my site and branding, never quite sure if I was done and always pushing the project to the back burner because client work comes first. So in May I got tired of looking at the old site, which was full of content, but not representative of my abilities as a designer and I decided to delete it all and move this site from development to live. It was not finished, and really it still isn’t but I knew that pushing it live with problems and missing pieces would be the only way I’d force myself to find the time to get it completed.

Missing work

And now, a few months after I launched it, I’m realizing how much of my work from my old portfolio is missing. When I launched this site in May I had only entered one website into my portfolio section, the rest was print work. Web design is my specialty so to only have one piece was not very good to say the least.

I’ve been working the past few weeks late a night to enter more pieces from my portfolio. Some of it is work from many years ago, some from clients, some from places I’ve worked, some freelance and some from my time as a student. What’s hard now is to go through all of my work, (find it first!) and decide what to include. There is a lot of work, and some of it is now outdated and shows it’s age, but I feel it is important to show some older pieces because it shows the history I have in the field.

So what do you think? Is it a good idea to include older work… to establish that history and chain of experience or is it better to show less and only show the most recent or best work of your career?