About the Author
Name: Nick Meincken
Occupation: Web designer and Front End Developer
Age: Old enough to know better apparently!
Location: Hoxton, East London
More information can be viewed via my CV available in these formats HTML, PDF and the rather hideous but required .DOC format.
5 things about me:
- I love design especially websites
- I like cups of tea and hobnobs
- I have an obsession with track bikes
- I am an advanced scuba diver (but really want to do my Divemaster)
- I want a monkey
So a bit about me… OK, here’s the fun part! I am a web designer and front end developer (shocking confession) but have been known to dabble in a little print design, this much you could probably tell by my website (designed and developed by me). I live in Shoreditch East London which is great for inspiration as I am surrounded by art work everywhere I go and I would like to think is the graffiti capital of Europe, it may even inspire a little of my work. I talk passionately about design and development to anyone or anything willing to listen and one day I may be able to blog about it, but at the moment I am trying to avoid boring people about it.
I am happy to admit being a geek, by this I mean I know far too much about computers and I read comics but not to be confused with a nerd which is completely different. Also not to brag, but my brain is full of useful and sometimes useless information which is stored and used when needed, this can be anything from singers in bands through to the director of obscure German gore movies. Which brings me onto my next 2 passions, Movies and Music. I love them both equally and if I could would split my head so I could code, design and listen to music with one head and watch a movie with the other I’d be happy… But this could scare people if I was to go around with 2 heads. I love gigging and feel I don’t go to enough gigs, but with the price of tickets I tend to pick and choose my gigs carefully and only see bands I really want to see.
I am proficient in Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, InDesign and Microsoft Office and is extremely confident with my skills. As you can see from this site I am also pretty good with tableless css, xhtml, some basic php and adaptive usage of wordpress and other CMS’s. I’ve also been known to do paintings on the odd occasion… But this happens about once in a blue moon.
About the Site
Meincken.com has been my personal project for little over 8 years, it originally started off as a portfolio for my photography, but over the years has evolved into what you see today. It has been through many incarnations from a basic table based site using iFrames, to a single page folio site to the now wordpress powered site you see to date!
The basic framework is the starkers theme by Elliot Jay Stocks which allowed me to have a completely blank canvas to start from.
I have made much of my own customizations to the code and included a number of different elements not available in the core installation. I also primarily uses jQuery for most of the DOM elements unless stated, I’m a big fan of the jQuery library because of its ease of use and quickly adaptable scripts. This site also uses a few wordpress specific plug ins listed below:
- cForms – on the contact page
- last.fm – In the social footer
I also make use of a few APIs in the form of my twitter feed and the flickr api, both of course styled to match the site.