Archive for the ‘websites’ Category

After talking recently about the pros and cons of building your own CMS with a colleague, and especially the time that goes into building one. Is it really worth it?

Now I must state that as primarily a designer, the developer role doesn’t come as easy to me. The main reason I use Wordpress on this blog is that is was so quick and easy to set up.

However with speed being a major factor with mobile web, Google rankings and the complexity of Wordpress, I’m pretty sure that a billy-basic CMS would load a lot quicker. But do people really care?

Reality probably means that I’ll stick with Wordpress, upgrade to v3 and be able to write blog posts like I am now on my iPhone.

So, have you ever written your own CMS, or wanted to, or do you think that off-the-shelf systems are more than capable?

This site has, it seems always remained in a state of flux. In it’s current ‘version 3′ guise I have never been 100% happy with it.

The many redesigns are usually due to me getting bored with the site. My skills and design knowledge have improved and a personal brand redesign along the way have changed the look also.

Part of the problem comes with a lack of purpose for the site. Although a designer I don’t have much of a portfolio on the website – mainly because I am currently in full-time employment and do not show any work I do during office hours. The site also isn’t a promotional tool either so it only exists to be a place to blog and host experiments.

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This is just a quick post to promote the new HigherSites website.

http://www.highersites.co.uk

We’re a web design company in Somerset, and although I have only recently joined the team in April, I have thoroughly enjoyed it so far – working on some great sites with an awesome team!

So, things look a little different here!

After a long period of inactivity, due to a new job, and other things the site has sat a little dorment. I thought it was time for a change, and after many, many revisions I decided to finally design something. So, after a few hours of work this weekend – here it is.

I’m hoping to tidy a few things up over the next week, and I will follow that up with a more indepth blog on the designs that didn’t make it.

If you do notice something weird, feel free to post a comment. It hasn’t been browser tested, but bear in mind that things may look a little funky for the next few days.

Thanks to all submissions, but the two winners have now been chosen (See comments)

I have some very exclusive Dribbble invites – 2 to be exact.

If you haven’t heard of it before, Dribbble is a site which allows you to upload 400×300px previews of your design work. I have been hugely impressed with it so far, and invites are very elusive.

If you would like the opportunity of winning a Dribbble invite, please leave a comment (with an email address and website/twitter account) below, and later on I will choose the lucky two and contact them directly.

A better-late-than-never post on a game played by Tim Van Damme, Elliot Jay Stocks and Sam Brown (i’m sure there are plenty more people playing the game!).

Simply go to your browser, type in the letters A-Z and blog the results. So here are mine:

1. amazon.co.uk
2. bucket.unstoppablerobotninja.com
3. cufon.shoqolate.com
4. delicious.com
5. entitycode.com
6. flickr.com
7. google.com
8. hootmonitor.com
9. ilovetypography.com
10. jasonsantamaria.com
11. kitbag.com
12. logooftheday.com
13. maban.co.uk
14. next.co.uk
15. o2.co.uk
16. prandall.com
17. n/a
18. readernaut.com
19. scrunchup.com
20. twitter.com
21. n/a
22. viget.com
23. n/a
24. xavierencinas.com
25. youtube.com
26. n/a

But rather than just knock them up in a UL like some, and being that kind of person I had to make an ordered list and use capitalised letters. The CSS to do that is:

.alphabet-list{list-style:upper-alpha}

So play along and leave your results as a comment!

One song, one piece of paper. Just doodle.

The point of this exercise was to see what kind of things I created when listening to different types of music; trying not to think about anything too much – just to have a doodle to see if what you listen to affects your creativity.

I just sat down and had a list of shuffle songs playing straight after the other. Occasionally lyrics made me draw certain objects, but usually I started on one main drawing and added parts to it as the song went on.

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As you may know, I designed the FootyTweets website with Ollie Parsley, and he recently received a Cease & Desist letter.

The site has around 17,000 subscribers, and sends thousands of visitors to the football teams official sites every day.

I would really appreciate it if you could leave a comment, digg, blog or tweet about this unfortunate sitatuation