Re-Design Part 2.
After re-designing my blog, and after thinking about people visiting my personal website I began to wonder whether it gave the correct message. I wanted an emphasis on the web design aspect as well as it to be aesthetically pleasing. I also wanted it to be of a higher standard in terms of the way that I had constructed it.
I decided to look at a simplistic design, one that was easy on the eye but looked nice. I like the dark background light foreground colour scheme, I feel as though it highlights the content and has a classier look about it.
I set off creating it with the idea in mind whereby I would use PHP for the navigation, and that worked fine and I am quite happy with it. I feel as though I am able to use PHP to a basic standard now. Admittedly I don’t know it well, but I know enough to get me by at this moment in time.
After creating the website as a whole I wondered about getting stats on it, and I prefer to use SlimStat, it is relatively easy to install and gives a good accurate reading of visitors etc, however, I soon realised that if I implemented it, every time a page was loaded it would treat it as a completely new visit… It came to me that I could put the code in a header file that stored the heading section of the design and it works a treat, I was quite pleased that I managed to think of doing that!
In order to make sure that there was an emphasis on my web design services I made sure that I included that in the header image of the website. I also have a portfolio, which obviously isn’t massively fully as this moment in time, however, I do have designs that I have created that I wish to put up in the portfolio. I felt as though the Lightbox image viewer was a good way of showing the viewers the designs as it ensures that they stay on the website and get a little preview of the design/website that they wish to, so the best of both worlds (there is also a link to the website). I also decided that it’d be a good idea to have a page on the services that I offer too.
Overall I think that it has come out quite successfully, it’s simple, but a good advert for my services. Lots of things worked well with improvisation and it works well in major browsers which was extremely pleasing to see. I ensured that it worked in FF and IE7 whilst producing it, however, I can’t get IE6 on Vista so I had to take a chance, but luckily, after testing it on the laptop I could easily see that it worked fine! I was extremely surprised. Normally, though, if I was creating the website for someone else I would test it along the way on the laptop, yeah it does take more time and effort to continually transfer the files to the laptop but it’s necessary in my eyes!
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