Website Design

After studying Web Design and Web Management as part of my BTEC National Diploma, I developed an interest in creating websites in my free time. Most of these were basic information sites made for myself or for friends and they had little to no actual functionality. During this time I managed to improve my HTML writing skills and started to look into CSS styling.

Using the W3C website as a guide and occasional searching online for inspirational uses of HTML and CSS, I developed my web design skills over the course of around a month. Shortly afterwards, a friend from college informed me that the company he was working for was looking for design integrators to join their team. Most employers were looking for commercial experience over qualifications so I considered this a lucky break. I now have over 2 years of commercial experience, working in a busy, professional web development environment and have produced websites for a large number of clients.

Listed below are some of the site's that I have completed in recent years, including personal projects as well as work completed for Quantum Web Solutions.

Scotch & Coffee

Personal Project with occasional feedback from a friend.

Scotch & Coffee is a site primarily focused on the 2 YouTube blogs, Archie Outlined and JustUrby. The design is a fairly basic, 1 page brochure site which links off to various different social networking sites related to the video blogs.

This site was originally designed in Photoshop CS3 and then sliced up to make the individual elements of the site. The site has maintained this appearance for several years and is due to be changed in the coming months with more emphasis on interactivity. The primary goal is to create a site suited to a community of video bloggers and their fans. Scotch & Coffee also acts as a modding team under the name SnC Game Studios which at present does not have a website.

The site did originally also feature a forum which had to be shut down due to heavy numbers of spam bots using a large about of bandwidth. I spite of this, the forum was pretty popular in it's earlier days, with up to 50 regular members visiting and posting in threads. I assisted in the maintenance and administration of the forums, as well as altering the template to make the appearance similar to that of the homepage. Visit the site.

Cyrus Homes

CMS brochure website based on a bespoke graphic design

Cyrus Homes is a CMS brochure website which was based on a bespoke graphic design produced by another member of my team. Starting with a very basic site template, I sliced up a .psd image containing the approved design, edited HTML, PHP and CSS files to build the site template and helped to organise additional programming and flash work in order to get the site to operate as required by the client. I spoke with the client several times throughout the construction of the site and assisted with editing and uploading images to be used in the fader banners on the site. I have made more minor adjustments and updated some images for the client since the site was transfered to a live server.

Image work requested by the client included removing objects from photographs, as well as cropping and improving the quality of photographs from a third party for use in the site banners. Visit the site.