Web Design and Support

Beautiful! That’s the only way to describe the botanical drawings by Jan Wilson. Jan urgently needed a web site to show the range of plants and flowers which she has captured on paper with coloured pencils. So a simple, very clean, ‘fluid’ design was required, which included a contact form. The images speak for themselves! Her pictures are reproduced by a fine art reprographic professional and certainly do her justice. In fact I am ordering a copy of one myself.

The group wanted to have a simple presence on the web to allow people to hear a sample of the music they play, as unusually for a string quartet, their first violinist actually plays a flute! They are keen to play their music at wedding celebration events . My challenge was to find a standards compliant way of playing a recording of their music. And to make my task a little more difficult the competition for good search engine positions in this subject is quite fierce. So currently we are fine-tuning the page to maximise our chances with the main Search Engines.

Debbie's site (DebbiePryer.co.uk) was an interesting and challenging design. We decided to aim for a CSS driven horizontal roll–over menu system, partly because we thought that the pages could use the extra width available and they wouldn't be too long. With 11 pages and a newsletter sign–up form at the bottom of every page, making a compact, efficient site to XHTML standards and maximising the benefits of (CSS) it turned out to be an enjoyable and rewarding project. We finally finished the site and it went live in early September 2007, just in time for the start of her busy work with local schools. Check out her monthly Newsletter; ‘Food News’, its absolutely fabulous!!

A presence on the web! Michael J. Ellis wanted a simple presence on the web to show his impressive list of work as a scriptwriter for TV and a playwright

This simple 5 page site for Ibis Training and Counselling Services became ‘live’ in the middle of May 2007. Using CSS Style sheets, and designed to XHTML 1.0 standards with ‘acccessibility’ built in. Having submitted Ibis training to the important Search Engines in the UK, I was very pleased to find that after only 1 week, the site has reach the TOP two positions on Google for the most likely to–be–used search phrase. Now that is what I call a ‘result’.

Spa Angels at Home, a home visiting beauty therapy business, came on–line during the summer of 2006. Based on the borders of Hampshire, Berkshire and Surrey, geography is one of the key elements to promote on this site so I optimised and submitting its pages to the UK search engines and have been actively monitoring the search engine results to ‘fine–tune’ the pages. During this year the Spa Angels have received emails from people visiting the site, which has lead to more business.

The Author Neil Nixon is very active in all sorts of areas, as you will see from his web site, and I'm pleased to say that he has found it invaluable, not only as a repository of examples of his recent work, but to promote possibilities of new project and new commissions. His ‘News’ page is updated quaterly.

Zeroth Active Zone is a Youth gym and the owners wanted me to give them a presence on the web. This is a small display of their facilities and range of courses that they provide in and around Maidstone, Kent.

A nice restful little site. A colourful CV and interesting topic. Jane's work with 'people problems' is very rewarding. This site recently benefitted from an 'under–the–bonnet' modernisation which resulted in, amongst other things, faster page downloads.

This site was great fun to do! The Artists Danny and Val display a lot of paintings and photographs. Although I'm not involved in this site now, as Danny is keen to maintain the web site himself he recently wanted me to design a modern horizontal menu (to take up less 'real estate' and help him with incorporating it into all the pages. The new design uses CSS, and is standards compliant to XHTML 1.0 (Transitional), so should continue to do well in the Search Engine listings.

I was asked to design the Penniesworld website as a simple, fun site for children and to promote a new book. The challenge was to provide an adult version as well as pages for children was added after initial inception of the project. There will be plans to update this site in the future.

North West Kent College invited me to tender for the design and administration of a site to display the works of the final year Media Student. As an ideal way for prospective employers to view large multi–media projects, photographs — and anything visual or aural. An interesting, but simple, project as the requirement was that the web design must be 'in the background', to ensure the student's efforts are seen without any distractions.