When I made the decision to move on from photography, and it became clear that web and application development was my future, I realized I was in desperate need of a personal portfolio site.
It has been several years since I've built a site, and so much has changed, that I knew I would need to go in to this process with an open mind. As usual when I get excited about something, I dove right in, putting in hundreds of hours of research, and watching dozens of video tutorial series.
My first instinct was to go back to Expression Engine, but I was familiar with Pixel & Tonic from my EE days, and had heard nothing but good things about Craft CMS, so I decided to give it a try. It has quickly become my favorite CMS - it's extremely powerful, but so easy that's it's actually fun to use.
Craft uses the Twig templating system, which has been a pleasant surprise. I was spoiled by EE's system, and had a hard time believing anything could compare favorably. But Twig has been great - extending templates, rather than being limited to includes, has been my favorite feature so far. I know I have only used a small portion of what Twig is capable of, and I am looking forward to continuing to learn.
Although I have dozens of local playgrounds, this is my first live HTML5 and CSS3 site. Rather than use my own grid, I decided to lean on an established system and build the site with Bootstrap. It has made the responsive design process extremely simple, and I can certainly see its value as a starting point, providing not only a comprehensive system, but also the subsequent standardization and consistency.