Allen Watson website redesign

Posted in on 8 July 2011 | Comments

There’s no such thing as a completed website because any website should be developed continuously. However, it has been good to ‘finish’ and launch two website projects over recent weeks. Here’s the first of those.

Allen Watson asked CVW Web Design to redesign and modernise their website and base the design on other marketing materials (for example, a CD featuring 3D animations of their drilling techniques).

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Comments on this blog

Posted in on 28 June 2011 | Comments [2]

I try and operate a sensible comments moderation policy on this blog but I see a lot of blogs that do not do this and that have a free-for-all comments policy (it seems). I think that approach devalues comments especially on high traffic/high visibility sites. If I was in charge of those sites, I would have tougher moderation on comments. Here’s what I do here.

  • Comments that don’t add value don’t get published. This means that comments that simply say “Nice blog, I appreciate your posts” will not get published. Whilst it may be nice to hear these sentiments about your blog, I’m never sure how genuine they are since many such comments are seemingly made just for the sake of getting a commenter’s website linked (even though the links have rel = "nofollow").
  • Comments that do not provide the commenter’s real name don’t get published. Any comments from “web design los angeles” or similar won’t see the light of day. This is some misguided attempt to get search engine credit via link keywords (it’s misguided because of rel = "nofollow") but if you cannot put your real name on a comment, well….
  • Comments should say something about the blog post, not just your personal site that you want to promote.

This is a perfectly sensible policy I think. Please add your own thoughts in the comments!

First steps with HTML5

Posted in on 1 June 2011 | Comments

HTML5 logo I have been wanting to revise and redesign CVW Web Design for a while and also get started with HTML5. So, with some spare time last weekend, I decided to strip down the style sheet for CVW Web Design and rebuild it and my site template using HTML5. I know the site very well so I thought this would be a gentle introduction to HTML5 and start me on the redesign process.

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Transparent borders with CSS3

Posted in on 3 May 2011 | Comments [10]

I’ve seen a few website examples recently (like this one) where transparent borders have been used so that the background image shows through the border. I think this is a really nice effect and it got me wondering how it’s done and if I could use this on my planned redesign of CVW Web Design. Turns out it’s relatively simple but there’s one ‘trick’ you will need to get it to work.

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The Cliff at Bude website redesign

Posted in on 20 April 2011 | Comments [2]

The Cliff at Bude is a medium-sized, family friendly hotel in Cornwall. In fact it’s owned by some friends of mine. Basically, I look after their website and they put me up in a room from time to time! I don’t know who has the best of that deal but it’s incumbent on me to redesign their website.

The latest redesign of the hotel site went live yesterday. It’s a more modern layout, compared with the previous 6-7 year old version, that attempts to highlight the hotel and the fantastic scenery in Bude. In the new version, I have used a few CSS3 properties to give drop shadows and rounded corners on some elements. Yes, yes, not another rounded corner, you may say. However, I think they do add something in many designs.

I’m pretty happy with the new design and I rushed to view it on Internet Explorer 9 when I upgraded the other day. Disappointingly, the 12px (equivalent) Arial font that is used in some areas of the website looks slightly worse in IE9 than other browsers on my system. Perhaps it’s my system/screen or something but I will need to assess in different browsers on other PCs. I’m surprised that a common font-size and Arial font is not as legible as it could be.

Despite this text foible, overall I’m very pleased with how the site turned out.

Update: I have assessed other sizes/fonts and it may be that I change the font-size for some elements from 12px to 13px – or change the font completely – in a few weeks. Let’s get some feedback first though.