Allen Watson website redesign

Posted in Portfolio 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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The Cliff at Bude website redesign

Posted in Portfolio 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.

Review and Revise - How to review your website

Posted in Portfolio Web design on 21 February 2011 | Comments

I’ve been reviewing CVW Web Design recently. It’s my main site, I want it to work as well as possible, and now seemed to be a good time to assess it (perhaps leading to a redesign). In this post, I’ll describe the process I am using. You may have alternative ways of doing this but here’s what I have done so far.

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New website for Chess Dynamics

Posted in Portfolio Web design on 10 February 2011 | Comments

At the end of last year, we finished a redesign of the Chess Dynamics website. It was a project that I really enjoyed working on for a number of reasons:

• The client provided the content, images and some design ideas at the right moments.
• The project had a number of challenges including the presentation of a lot of product information. I think we solved these with methods that achieved the objectives.
• The project took several months but, importantly, it felt like we were always moving forward.
• Although there were some changes in the design and layout, it was pretty much an iteration of the initial concept that became the final version. Since I really liked the initial concept, I’m happy!

Now, if only every single project was like that!

The La La Card Company website

Posted in Portfolio Ecommerce on 2 March 2010 | Comments

Here’s a little plug for an ecommerce website that we launched recently. The La La Card Company sells decoupage card kits, single card kits and other card-making items for download.

The design was created from Photoshop images provided by the client and we used SugarSync to share a folder between us. SugarSync is a back-up and synchonisation tool but you can also use it to share folders with someone else. It worked really well.

For this project, we built a demo product listing page on a testing server so that the client could see how the product might be displayed. This work was paid for by the client but it served to highlight a number of issues that were addressed in the website itself. I will probably do this with other clients if there are questions that cannot be answered before an ecommerce project starts.

Now that the The La La Card Company has been launched, we may not be doing as much work with it but I think it’s important to say that an ecommerce website (or any website for that matter) is never actually finished. There are always items that can be added or pages to be tweaked and the shop software can be updated. In fact, most websites would benefit from a continual programme of improvements but often this is not done. If you are a small business with a website that has been static (ahem) for a while, I would urge you to consider allocating someone from your company to update the website or get someone on board to carry out a maintenance programme even if it’s only for an hour or two every month. After all, you wouldn’t ignore other parts of your business would you?