My new site's live and here's the full story.

I designed the site using a mix of Sketch and designing in the browser. I'll tweak the copy a bit more I'm sure but one of the first things I did was get the content sorted. I used Sketch to get an idea of visual atmosphere - colours, typography, that sort of thing. Once I'd done that, I used Sublime Text to create all the basic HTML based on the content that I'd prepared earlier, with Hammer for Mac keeping a watchful eye on everything. After setting up the site structure I styled everything with SASS in Hammer and got all of my template pages looking just how I wanted them.

I took the templates out of the Build folder in Hammer and transferred everything to the htdocs folder in MAMP so I could set Perch up locally and get everything working on my machine.

I used Perch on the previous version of my site and thought it was great then, but I decided to do it all from scratch this time rather than edit the existing site, because I wanted to cement my knowledge of it. I totally flew through it this time (excuse the pun)!

Perch is used for the contact forms on all pages (apart from at the bottom of blog posts, which I'm still working out...), and to manage the blog. I've still got absolutely loads I'm planning to do with it - Perchify the Work section, style a really nice comments section (my old one was so-so), etc - and am still really surprised how easy it is to implement Perch each time I use it. I can't wait to use it on something bigger like an ecommerce site so I can try out a few more of the apps.

See my site here - Pete Blakemore Design