Web Site Design and Support

Here are some links to sites which I’m currently involved in. I’m either actively supporting them, or developing pages on them, or involved on an occasional basis to update a page. Having run a business of my own, I like to feel that I'm actively involved with the owners in maintaining these websites to the best benefit of their business or interest.

At long last the Sidney Driscoll NeuroScience Foundation site is now live - a few last minute things were sorted out with a couple of forms once the site went live. I enjoyed working on this site and am keep to support the Charity in whatever way I can.

So, read on and catch up with the latest news, all the links on this page will open a new window of your browser, so you can return here – maybe to explore another link.

Sidney Driscoll NeuroScience Foundation The site is another 'fluid' width design, with Javascript/DOM/CSS hide/reveal. All to W3C standards and Usability recommendations, in line with the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 1.0. To help keep costs down fo rthe Charity I've hosted the site within my own web space as a sub-domain

An existing client, Michael J. Ellis, asked me to set up another small site for him. 'Everything-but-the-song' will publicize his song-writing talents. The idea of the site is to show singers that there are original songs, (extracts of which they can hear), which they are able to 'buy' the rights to perform. All Michael's songs are registered with the Performing Rights Society (PRSforMusic).
So, initially we have shown a small, but growing, number of song extracts and a simple contact form to see how much interest is generated by the site. Interested singers can receive a full copy of the music track, the lyrics and chords and performing permission on receipt of performance dates and locations and a small fee. Listen to the latest sample tracks here. The site incorporates SSI, and Javascript for manipulation of the DOM for CSS hide/reveal. All to the W3C standards - and it passes the iCITA HTML Best Practices tests for using techniques for the implementation of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 1.0. The site may finally expand to include automated Paypal services and lyrics viewing and song downloads.

Another 'fluid' design. A 'clean' site in more ways than one. This new site for a new company, based close to London and the intended market of the large city companies. Purple Fox intends to provide the very best, most enthusiastically provided, cleaning and related services. This site uses SSI for easy updates of the news sections and will also soon incorporate the use of Javascript for manipulation of the DOM for CSS hide/reveal. All to the W3C standards - and W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 1.0.

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 ordered 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

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.

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.