Web design

From time to time I dabble in web design. There is more information below, with links to relevant sites. Since these may change over time, historical screenshots of the various designs in which I was involved are shown in the sidebar.

There's nothing cutting edge here! I just find this kind of thing fun sometimes and it's nice to keep a history of designs to look through once in a while.

Pond's Place - this site!

Cambridge '99 Rowing Club - I created the site in about 1998 and maintained it thereafter, with quite a few design changes over the years. In 2005 other people looked after things and the overall design didn't change, until 2011 when I found time to give it an overhaul.

RISC OS Open - a company I'm involved with which is opening up the source code of a 32-bit ARM-based operating system called RISC OS. The design has been through a couple of major iterations. Not intended for use with Internet Explorer 6 (the nature of the user community is such that this restriction is irrelevant). The site consists of an integrated set of Ruby On Rails applications run under a single sign-on mechanism called Hub.

An open source multi-vendor e-commerce site for artists under the project name of Artisan has a couple of default themes, including the brown "Coffee". Artisan is a Rails application I wrote as an open source project for a friend who wanted to use the software for their business. The "Coffee" theme is intended to be eye catching but reasonably plain, so that it can readily be understood and adapted by people wanting to build custom themes for their own site. Some high end CSS effects are experimented with here for browsers which support them, including transformations such as scaling and rotation, drop shadows and rounded corners.

The first commercial use of Artisan is by Comuniart, using themes designed in Photoshop by the site's owner which I implemented for the real site.

Ash Removals - a web site I did from a friend of mine who was doing some rebranding on his removals company. This was mostly a question of implementing the site based on artwork he had and helping create an overall page structure. Built on top of the PHP CMS Website Baker.

Endurance Technology - my software contracting agency. They wanted a site redesign with a few loose guidelines; mostly, it's my design. The idea was to give them an easy route to editing news items and page content, so again the site is based on Website Baker (I quite like it; it's got a good balance of simplicity, flexibility, installs easily onto relatively heavily constraint hosting services and is easy to use for the administrator). Later the company expanded and spun off Endurance Thailand.

Corton Consulting - a re-implementation of an existing design using a CMS rather than its old static pages to make it easier for the company to edit things. Most of the design comes from the original site with just a few tweaks here and there. Corton was later acquired by Endurance.