Archive for Websites

Ed Slater website now live!

I’ve just completed work on a new website for an artists friend of mine, Ed Slater. I designed my own PHP-based gallery component, which works really well. I used a lovely script from TopUp for the javascript pop-up images, but the gallery code I made creates its own thumbnails! Whoop whoop!

For the rest, Ed wanted a simple but stylish website, and I hope I’ve achieved that!

Ed Slater screenshot

The Source website

My latest website has been live for a few weeks now. The site is for a music venue in Carlisle called The Source.

The Source screenshot

The Source screenshot

The brief was to design a site that could sell tickets for gigs, and organise events and gigs fairly painlessly, without having to use a developer every time they wanted to change something.

I used a Joomla installation, coupled with Event Booking Pro by Jomdonation. I needed some core tweaks to get the display I wanted, and there are still a couple of things I want to do better, but broadly it has worked really well.

Jane Rose mosaics goes live

I’ve just finished work on a new website for a friend of Crown Gallery, Jane Rose. I’ve designed her a nice little 5 page website to complement her mosaics teaching practice.

Jane Rose Mosaics

Jane Rose Mosaics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m dead chuffed with design because I wanted to do a multi-column design without using tables. I managed this with pure CSS, which, so far as I can make out, renders well in a range of the usual browsers. Even doesn’t look too bad in IE6.

Anyway, next project beckons!

Crown Gallery

Crown Gallery thumbnail

Crown Gallery

www.crowngallery.net This is a website I have designed for a shop that my partner and I are opening in November 2010. It’s a Joomla based site, and the first time I’ve tried using the tableless design you get with the Beez template in Joomla.

Because I wanted to have the site looking pristine, I’ve also had to change some of the coding to get things running right. Putting my new PHP skills to the test!

Angels with Paws website

Angels with Paws - Screenshot

Angels with Paws - Screenshot

I’ve just finished working on a new website for a client, www.angelswithpaws.co.uk. She had already designed a website using MS Publisher (poor lass, it must have taken ages!), and I took her basic design and implemented it in HTML and CSS. She is a very ‘girly’ lady, hence her liking for pink colours and flowers in the design. Read more

Cosmic Ray Images

Atmospheres thumbnail

Atmospheres thumbnail

This is my first bit of paid work! Woo hoo. My mate Ray wanted me to design a website using some images he’d already paid to have made. I knocked him up this site; cosmicrayimages.thenorthernview.biz I was happy that I managed to design him something which used the images to good effect, but also kept the style he wanted. Anyway, Ray was happy, and that’s the most important thing.

I created a table-free CSS based design using Ray’s images, and emulated the style he had for his original site.

Carlisle Mountaineering Club

CMC thumbnail

CMC thumbnail

Ok, so my first website that I designed was for Carlisle Mountaineering Club. It quickly outgrew it’s meagre roots, so I decided to get to grips with Joomla! to expand it. I’ve been ‘getting to grips’ with Joomla ever since, and that was two years ago. It’s a hugely entertaining and interesting piece of software. By now my site had morphed into a huge, bloated beast of a site, with so many add-ons and bits of software. It really needs a good spring clean, but that will have to wait. It still does its job, just not very elegantly. It’s been really useful in that I’ve managed to learn loads about using Joomla from it, and I’ve had lots of opportunities to get into the nuts and bolts of how it works, which has helped my design better sites.

Whilst I’ve developed it I’ve also had to get to grips with XAMPP (the server formerly known as LAMPP) for development and testing of sites on my own computer, and also delved into the murky world of site security, and how not to get hacked.