Bristol Web Designer

Every once in a while I get to work with some absolutely delightful people and this is one of those occasions. Panthers are a long established Bristol kickboxing club who wanted a website to promote their club and communicate with their members via the internet. They approached several designers, received some mixed reactions and were given some very bad advice in my opinion about registering their domain name and hosting. Fortunately I was able to resolve the problems and get them back on the right track.

There were many pictures that Panthers wanted to use and these have been displayed using a “hoverbox” effect and also incorporated some FlickR slideshows into the training pages. The new website has been launched and is going through some final tweaks, and the club are very pleased with our efforts to provide what they wanted. Panthers are now working on getting themselves some good rankings for searches.

It’s that time of year again when I can get at our website and give it a bit of a wash and brush-up. This time however I thought it needed a complete makeover as since it had been live it had become too busy, had many additions and deletions and, I thought, it had a rather tired look.

The new look design is very clean and simple, not too many colours and has very simple navigation. All the content is still there, in one form or another, though has been rearranged logically (I hope) to keep it as simple as possible.

The old logo and background has gone as well, and a new logo has been produced. I’ve used a ‘folks’ text which was in the header of the old site and so keeps some semblance of continuity and I’m pleased with it. It’s sad to see the Clifton Suspension Bridge go, but you never know, I may bring it back at some time.

Meanwhile I’m leaving comments open on this post, so if anyone would care to pass judgment on the new design I’d be pleased to hear from you.

Content management with joomla is a bit of a new venture for us but we have completed a web site using this for a Psychology tutor in Bristol.

Though the layout of the site is pretty familiar the client is very happy with the finished result and it was a low cost venture for all concerned.

Voip has interested me from both a technical and cost saving perspective. I have tinkered with it but have not been overly impressed with the quality or ease of use until recently.

I tried a few providers using a “soft phone” and headset both paid and unpaid through my desktop but really didn’t think it was that good and was on the verge of giving up. However over the last month or so I noticed on a business forum a lot of discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of voip itself and then some further discussion on hardware. This led me to look again at the possibilities and providers. Continue Reading →

New Bristol Roofing Company web site has been launched today.

Under instruction from the client Steve Pillinger Roofing, we have created a website along traditional design concepts. The site is informational and aimed at domestic and commercial customers in the Bristol, Bath and South West. The site contains some interesting images of their work and recent roofing projects in the South West. To display the images we used the “hoverbox” method displaying a thumbnail, larger image on hover and largest image on click. There are also 2 flash movies in the site. One shows, on the home page, a run through of recently completed work, while the other shows step by step the roofing contractor at work. There will be some fine tuning over the next couple of weeks while the owner gets used to their new site.