Eric Baker: my websites

Home My websites Photo resources Photo gallery Hints & tips Links Contact	This big site went live in August 2011. It shows what a visually attractive site you can make if the owners supply such lovely images. It has a revolving image gallery on the home page plus viewer controlled galleries on seven other pages.	This site shows off an extensive range of superb photos in galleries. A complete redesign in Autumn 2011, with well over 100 new images, took me around 16 hours.
	An almost edible site - did you ever see such yummy looking food? It's quite a big site, but with no scripting or expandable images it only took me ten hours to final draft stage. The new learn and lunch gallery gives a very good idea of how much fun it was.	An elegant, simple site with lovely paintings and drawings that speak for themselves. Nothing flashy here.
	An interesting site - block panels of colour, with content starting as high as possible. A therapy site using the owner's own paintings.	We met the owners of this bookstore site when staying with friends in Florida. So we have met but all the site design and development has been done at long distance.
	This charity in Twickenham were stuck with an out of date one page website so I did a nice new one for them, with a photo gallery and a news page with new items at the top, blog style.	This site shows off a large collection of lovely paintings. Note the unique banner for each page.
	This site, similar to an earlier one stylistically (see below), was quite a challenge - it's a big site and is nearly all in Dutch. Google Chrome provides translations that are often plausible but sometimes hilarious.	This was my first big site after my own and shows off some stunning paintings. It's got an unusual menu structure, as the choices available change as you move around.
	This site was a replacement for an out of date one that had been done in Flash. The new one will work on anything (eg iPhones) and has a nice little Event Archive gallery.	Here's the latest version of a very clear therapy site that was redesigned and extensively amended in April 2011.
	This is a big, elegant two tone site with lots of text, lovely photos and extremely clear navigation around its 18 pages. It's also got one page in Dutch.	I redesigned this little site with a javascript gallery that shows what an amazing skill plastering is.
	This is a simple man with a van site that took me under 4 hours for the initial version, including a nice load space photo diagram.	This is a very simple, 3 page site. It was my first ever site (other than my own) but was more recently recast in a much more elegant style.
	Here's a furniture and kitchen design site I did a while back.
	I started building, as opposed to designing, websites relatively recently (early 2008). I find it a very enjoyable blend of giving people what they want plus a lot of design and technical elements. My basic philosophy is to make sites that look good, have clear navigation, present the content effectively and are above all sustainable. They're not the flashiest sites around but they are easy to amend so as to keep them up to date. If I were to disappear to an island in the Pacific anyone with reasonable web skills could pick up any of my sites and carry on developing it. I do use use quite fancy image galleries now (driven by javascript/css) but my websites mostly consist purely of a css style sheet file plus html web pages plus images (jpg, gif or png as appropriate). I avoid website generators that tie you in, especially Dreamweaver. And I'm not involved with any database dependent sites, eg ones with shopping baskets. So my sites will run anywhere on the web at minimum cost. Some cost under ten pounds a year for the domain name plus hosting. I make sure all my images are from legitimate sources, eg my own or from Wikimedia, so there's no danger from those 'spiders' looking for copyrighted images. All the software I use to build, extend and upload sites is free other than Photoshop Elements and occasionally DrawPlus (both of which are cheap). The one thing that may stop a site I've done working on just about any device (eg PC, laptop, Mac, netbook, iPad, smartphone) is that where there is any video it's likely to be in Flash (flv) format, eg hosted by flickr. iPads and iPhones can't do Flash, but PCs, netbooks, Macs and most smartphones can.	Above are links to my main creations (all the ones currently active), shown running in different browsers (I always test in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer 8, Safari and Opera, listed in order of which I like best) and also try pages with a site that shows how they look in Safari on a Mac. I'm told I should include some testimonials. The sites I've done speak for themselves but here are a few: "Many thanks for the swift and elegant work, as well as all the personal attention and support." "a big thank you for the wonderful job you have done." "De website is echt heel mooi geworden!! Goed werk!" "You are like a breath of fresh air to work with!" "Eric is the man. You ask incoherently for something rather like......... And the next minute there it is on the screen looking smart and impressive. And it works on all the browsers - which most don’t." "On to the website - I am really happy with what you have done, it's so what I wanted but wasn't really sure how it was going to look - thankyou so much for interpreting my 'muddled thoughts/brain' into something just so perfect (almost)" With the last one I never even met the owner of the site - it was all done over the phone and via email. And everybody's surprised how little it costs to get a nice site up and running (and then keep it up to date).