Website Design

I'm not an 'artist' and have very little talent for drawing or painting, However I found that computers were a great way for me to design and produce things that looked good. Once I discovered the earliest desktop publishing packages, I found I could produce reasonably good layouts for posters, cassette inlays etc.

This then developed to producing my first website for The Flares (one of the bands I played in). My first attempt used Microsoft Publisher (as I was familiar with this), and I could convert a Publisher document into a web page fairly simply (with a Microsoft Wizard), However I soon discovered the limitations of this, and realised I needed to use 'proper' web design software.

Dreamweaver became my applciation of choice - I've no idea if it's the 'best' or the 'simplest' - but I taught myself how to use it, and it's serverd me very well so far. Staring from simple websites using tables for layouts, I've prgressed through using frames and layers, and now CSS files. I've also 'dabbled' in Javascript and PHP scripts, mainly by downloading examples from the web and then ammending them for my own use. I've also begun to use ASP pages (both on the Status Computers website and also at work), and begin to teach myself ASP / SQL integration (producing simple web pages at work to query and update SQL databases).

Since my first website for The Flares, I designed and maintained the website for Bad Toad (whilst I was playing with them), and also helped my good friends at Status Computers with the design of their website.

Bad Toad

I used frames to create a menu bar on the left hand side, and a tile bar across the top. I used a javascript menu (that I found on the web) for the left hand menu, and used Javascript to change the title frame whenever the main page was changed. By using the 'transform' effect I was able to have the title page to load (from left to right) after the main page (which gave a nice effect.

I used a PHP script on the homepage to read through a text file kept on the server and printout a message specific to the date (used to advertise gigs etc). This was very effective (although a little labour intensive to set up as the text file contains 365 lines - one for each day of the year)

I used an HTML form and a PHP mail script to allow visitors to the site to request details for bookings etc, with the results of their request emailed to us.

There was also a password protected area, which used a Javascript formula to check the password (to ensure that no-one reading the source of the HTML could find out the password).

Status Computers

This website was created using ASP pages and CSS for all design work. This allows for overall design and layout changes to be made very simply.

The links across the top of the page give access to a Text Only design (removing all formatting and graphics) - useful for text readers and also mobile phones. There is also a Printer Friendly version which reformats the page to A4 size, and again removes uneccesary images and formatting. Finally there is a text size selector that will adjust the basic text size of the entire website.

The latest news banner shown on the homepage, and the news page itself, use text files for the details of the news items and logos etc. This means the news articles can be ammended without any knowledge of HTML. The intention was to further develop this into a database driven system (with a web front end) so that users could update the website 'online'. This is still 'awaiting development'...

The header and menu bars are done using include files, to make their maintenance much simpler.

This also made is simple to create 'sub menus' - you can see on the Software Solutions page, the menu bar changes to a sub menu specifcally for the Software pages.