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 This site shows off an extensive range of superb photos in galleries. It is a wide rather than deep design, to suit the wide, shallow screens becoming almost universal. |
 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. |
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 Here's the third version of a therapy site built almost exclusively on email and telephone communications - just a one hour initial design meeting. Site navigation could hardly be clearer. |
 An elegant, simple site with lovely paintings and drawings that speak for themselves. Nothing flashy here. |
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 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. |
 This site shows off a large collection of lovely paintings. The navigation buttons are particularly clear, reinforcing the unique banner for each page. |
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 This large site was first done in Dreamweaver but was falling into disrepair. I completely remodelled and updated it in the style of the original but with no Dreamweaver dependency. The school staff make most changes themselves now. |
 Here's a site showing off lots of stunning paintings. The navigation is unusual - the menu changes depending on where you are. |
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 This is a simple man with a van site that took me under 4 hours, 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 recently recast in a much more elegant style. |
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 Here's a furniture and kitchen design site I did a while back. |
 Here's a good-looking, easy to navigate site controlled almost entirely from a single stylesheet (css) file. |
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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. Even the 'hotspot' image menu at the top of my own home page is done purely in html. 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 many
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). I'm told I should include some testimonials. The sites I've done speak for themselves but here is a selection: "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." 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). |
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