web design - portfolio

This is the website you're currently visiting. The site was created as a place for me to display some of the web and photographic things I've been doing recently. I also used it as an exercise in creating the most standards compliant and accessible website I could.

The site was built from the ground up using semantic structural markup for content and CSS for presentation. The resulting site is very light in terms of filesizes, standards compliant, has good cross-browser support and is accessible.

Javascript was used for some niceties such as the showing / hiding of the detailed descriptions on this page. Where Javascript offers significant functionality, a non-javascript version is also provided.

PHP was used to automatically generate the navigational elements and to generate some of the page items that can be labour intensive to maintain, such as the last revised date.

This is the website of a project created to develop an interactive web-based database of recent UK library buildings.

The main purpose of the website is to provide a front-end to the project database. This allows visitors to the site to search and view records, visitors to the site are also able to suggest changes to existing records or propose new records. The website also provides facilities for database editors to add, edit and delete records in the database.

A large part of the site content is dynamically generated, either using data from main database, or using small "bolted in" content and news management systems.

The entire site, including the visual design, back-end database and underlying PHP and javascript scripting, was designed and created by myself. Close attention was given to site accessibilty and conformance to web standards. The resulting site is consequently valid HTML and also conforms to the W3C "Priority 2" guidelines for accessibility.

I redesigned the site in late 2005. The main aim of the redesign was to give the front page of the site a more dynamic feel. The new design allows for a wider range of information on the front page. The look of the entire site was altered to conform to the new design. The front page of the site was altered further in mid 2006 to bring it more in line with the look of the project's leaflet and stationary design.

I was involved in the redesign of the website for Information Services at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. I was responsible for creating the new look (click here for a screenshot of the previous design), designing a new menu style and adding accessibility features.

The new design had to accomodate existing content as no new content was being created for the new design. The resulting site incorporates menus with nested sub-menu options providing short-cuts to commonly used pages. The pages are valid HTML and conform to the W3C "Priority 2" guidelines for accessibility. New accessibility features were added, these include a facility which enables the user to choose from a selection of colour schemes. The user is also able to alter the text size via an option on the webpage.

This website provides an online database of shops, cafes, restaurants and any other places that are child friendly (or not so friendly). Visitors to the site are encouraged to provide reviews of places they have visited. The site has received media attention and is regularly featured in relevant magazines.

The entire site, including the visual design, back-end database and underlying PHP and javascript scripting, was designed and created by myself. Although functional, the current design requires some work to improve its standards compliance and accessibility. Since this a personal site, the amount of time I have available to work on it is limited, I hope to improve it sometime soon.

This website was created for a research project that ran from December 2000 to July 2002. The site itself was built in early 2001. The purpose of the project was to provide bilingual online database of descriptions of research collections in Wales.

The website was created to provide to an interface to the database, enabling users to search and view database records. Due to its age the site does not particularly conform to web standards, neither is it very accessible. Given the opportunity it would be relatively easy to modernize.