Bens Car Blog
Background
After graduating in 2014 and moving to Minnesota, I made a number of friends in local car clubs. Thanks to the awesome communities there, I found myself attending more events, meets, and just spending more time around cars. As it was such a big part of my life, I found myself wanting to share my experiences with others and decided to start a new blog dedicated solely to my hobby.
Ben's Car Blog was originally launched as a subdomain of bpwalters.com. A few months and articles later, I finally had the time to dedicate to designing a new, separate site for my car content.
Rather than copy an existing theme, I decided to take the time and create a new design from scratch, building off of my own custom flexbox-based framework.
I spent a few weeks researching car blogs, and took a lot of my inspiration from sites like nickscarblog.com and claveyscorner.com. As it turns out, there just aren't that many other folks running their own car blogs!
Overall, I had a lot of fun designing the site. Thanks to Jekyll, creating new content and expanding the site is super easy.
This is by far my most active project, and I try to put out new content every few weeks. The blog has become an outlet for me creatively - allowing me to hone my UX/UI skills, CSS, writing, photography, and much more.
Objectives
- Design a responsive, minimalist layout from scratch
- Utilize high quality photos to enhance content
- Create a documented history of my cars
- Generate a journal-like repository of mods, maintenance, and experiences for my cars
- Build a supporting Instagram account