Web Design Berkshire

Just completed a website for Tango Chocolate!

Hayden — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:54:36 +0000

My brief was to design a website for Tango, as a new range of chocolate bar and balls were due to hit the market in march. It was a good time for me to express a little creativity, the reins were lossened a little so I got to work.

With nothing more than a range of colours, fonts and some pictures of pieces of fruit, I designed a PSD which was approved. My next task was to convert this into a DotNetNuke skin. DNN6 had been out only a few days so it was perhaps a little like a new toy to me!

Anyway, with a few helpings of HTML and CSS with some perfectly positioned elements with a touch of flash, the tango Chocolate website soon came to life.
The font used had to be licenced, whihc can be a bummer at times but there are times when a brand is a brand and you get what you pay for.

For some strange reason Microsoft decided to remove the font from windows 7, which mean that anybody viewing the website on a windows 7 would be faced with a rather ugly typeface. @fontface soon fixed that!

Anyway, I would love to hear your comments, let me know what you think!

DotNetNuke Skin Design

Hayden — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:51:32 +0000

If you don’t yet know what DotNetNuke is then rest assured that I will be writing a post all about DotNetNuke and it’s pro’s and cons. We use it at work as our main CMS (although secretly I do love playing in wordpress much more!) it is a great CMS particulary for larger sites.
DotNetNuke has definately come into its prime in version 6 and has gone all web 2 on us!

I will talk more about that later, this post is about what I do with DotNetNuke and how I use it to build websites.

Just like WordPress, DotNetNuke cas a market of themes, in the DNN marketplace they are called skins and work in the same way that you make a wordpress site look good, through the use of graphics and css.

What I do:

Create a custom design from a PSD which then get turned into a
HTML design that i run through the W3C Validator to make sure everything is correctly coded, I then
Recode it into a DotNetNuke skin and upload it to a server for testing, once I am happy I
Add contest the the site and make a backup before handover

My average turaround for a DotNetNuke site is around three days at the most basic level, but of course this greatly depends on how much content is involved and if there are any custom modules or extra that are required.

WordPress Theme Design

Hayden — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:59:35 +0000

What I do:

Install and secure your wordpress installation or your servers or mine.
Customise and exsisting wordpress theme or design a theme from scratch.
Install all relevant plugins required to maximise your SEO efforts.
Create your pages, including but not limited to, Blog page, Contact page with forms and maps, galleries, online stores with payment processing.
Brand your website with custom logo’s and colours
Turn your site into a mobile friendly version to match your brand.

So there you have it! That’s how I roll with wordpress. There is not enough that can be said about this world class content management system. Its cheap to run on most servers, easy to learn and pretty secure. If you are planning a small to medium website then wordpress will be all you need.

If you are planning something larger then perhaps DotNetNuke is what you need..

Introducing Genesis!

Hayden — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:17:18 +0000

I love wordpress frameworks. I have tried them all. I worked my way through thematic, which has excellent support and is solid, best of all it don’t cost a bean. Moved on to thesis and for some reason or other I just plain hated it, I could never get the hang of it. I might just try to give it more time and see what happens.

I found Genesis. Now I have been a long time customer of studiopress and have purchased a few themes before I purchased the framework. The main thing that kept my eyeballs locked onto Genesis over Thesis was the fact that I could build websites fro my clients without royalty fees.

DIYThemes.com charges per site or install, which is money out of my pocket, and I dont like that! Genesis has been logical from the start. Open up the stylesheet with a sprinking of firebug and you can see exactly what is going on from the beginning.

This site was originally created using the Starkers theme and I had no problem moving the site into Genesis. Plus, the stylesheet is so well coded and commented that it did in fact teach me a thing or two. I am a messy coder at times and I have a feeling that Genesis is going to ensure that my coding is tight at all times.

This year I hope to release my own Genesis themes onto the marketplace, my initial release will be free so I look forward to hearing your comments when i release it! In the meantime I would really love to hear your comments on the site right now!