Today marks the second official day of my job hunt. I sent out another three applications today. All were to local businesses I heard of from friends. The process takes a while, I admit…but you don’t want your cover letter to be a template. They just blend in with everyone else’s. That is why I worry a little about doing the “auto-apply” they have on sites like monster.com. If the option is there to apply manually, I think it would work out better in your favor. Some of the applications seem to have personalized questionnaires to learn more about the applicant. Something that you can’t fill out if you do it through monster.

It’s still way too early to know for sure…at least for me, but for now I will be doing a mix of manual applications and automated ones using monster. I’ll report my findings once I find a job.

So here it is…the new design that I’ve been working on for the past week since I lost my job to the economy.

If you look at my description on the portfolio page featured post, I said that I was trying to focus less on very prominent textures. This was a problem that I was always running into when I first started doing Wordpress themes for myself. In fact, the design I scrapped for this one was a complete mess in that regard. Very contrasty, grainy texture that I grew sick of just from looking at it for more than five minutes at a time. I decided to just scrap it, because I know that if I think it’s too textured then so would everyone else.

This is the first design that I completely shut out Internet Explorer 6 from. Since it is my personal site, I figured why not. I hate the browser itself (all Internet Explorer versions actually). I created a backup site for all IE6 users though…so they can at least download a minified version of my portfolio + resume, but if they are design studios still using IE6 as a standard developing browser..then I really don’t want anything to do with them. If they are clients on the other hand, that’s fine. I’ll still support IE6 for client work.

The Brads – Browser Support

Some cool things to point out in this design:

1. I added a cool contact menu/drop down that contains a link to download my resume, my various forms of contact (email, twitter, facebook) and a contact form. This was something I always wanted to do, but never got around to it due to the business of working. It’s running on an adapted script I found called slidebox and it runs off jQuery.

2. I created a homepage slideshow with a bit more personality than something I would normally do. I see creative slideshows like this on cool sites like those featured on Smashing Magazine, Web Design Ledger, Web Designer Depot etc…and always wanted to do one myself. I hope it will give me an advantage when web design studios come to my site looking for more information.

3. I incorporated my twitter feed into the footer of my site. Again, something I’ve always wanted to do. I really like sites that do something with their social networking feeds. It gives you a small view into their personalities.

There are other various bits and pieces thrown in here as well that I won’t go into, but overall, I am very happy with the way this site came out. I want to thank my fiancee, Kat Hall, who is a web/print designer, for giving me feedback on my various layouts and page templates.