Web design
I have built websites since the dawn of the internet age. Even as early as 1996. I will not, however, bore you with loads of old work that I keep around for nostalgia, but instead I will focus on a sampling of some of the work that I am most proud of. Building websites or intranet pages is easy – anyone can do it. Not everyone can do it well, on the other hand. That is why it is important to hire professionals to do the best that they can do, so that you can focus on your own business.
Churston Heard Website sketch
Churston Heard underwent a major update to its corporate identity in 2005. They felt that their old style website was feeling a bit dated after 5 years.
I presented this suggestion of a design to make the company more attractive to its potential clients. Moving the focus away from promoting the company name , to actually showcase the properties available. The red areas, a part of the new corporate identity, were never quite to my liking, so I decided to soften them up with some gentle gradients. I really wanted the content to “pop” on the site, especially with all the great photos of different locations available.
Unfortunately the website never came to be. However, I still like the design.
7city CFA portal
The 7city CFA portal, was part of the same solution as the ACCA portal. This view in particular shows the progress bar on top, with missed lessons highlighted in red, unfinished lessons in orange, and finished lessons in green.
Together with a lot of interactive content, as well as e-books readable online, the solution earned 7city an award for best e-learning solution in 2007.
7city ACCA portal
It was a pleasure to work on the ACCA portal for 7city. Mostly because I was given great responsibility not only of the design, but also the structure of the site. The portal was a complete online-learning experience, where students were able to access materials, track their progress and communicate with the teachers, and also play online trading games for the stockmarket.
The site was coded according to standards, with some quite advanced CSS-styling. Considering that Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6 were widely used, this presented some problems, and some inventive ways to solve the design issues.
The portal also needed to be theme-able, so that companies who bought it could have it follow their design guidelines.
7city Website
My responsibility for the 7city website, was bringing its code up to standards. The design was set by the head of design, but the code itself needed trimming as it was built around the use of tables and loads and loads of images.
I brought the code up to XHTML standards, and implemented css stylesheets. I also structured the site to follow a logical structure instead of using the same folders for all pages, images and media files.
This also made it a breaze to implement yet another localized version of the site aimed towards the US market. By re-using elements and code on the site, the site experienced decreased loading time, fewer http-requests (how many times it had to talk to the server) and fewer images to load. We also experimented with sprites, to decrease loading time. The acceptance of standards also made the site easier for search engines to index.
The site was cross-browser compatible with all the leading web browsers of the time with near pixel perfection.
The site consisted of flat files, and no content management system.
7city touch screen interface
At 7city they did a trial with automated sign in to their classes. Instead of having their students register manually at the reception desk, this solution was presented as a way to save both time and effort in keeping track of which students attended class.
I was responsible for the design, but some of my suggestions were scrapped in the final design. For instance: using white or clear colours as a background will result in smudges and dirt becoming more apparent , which in turn might dissuade users from handling a terminal. With contrasting background, especially white, will burn out screens a lot quicker, and also may hurt peoples eyes. My inital draft adressed these and other issues, but you cannot win them all.
Unfortunately it was not implemented after the initial trial, as touch screens were too expensive at the time and the adaption was not as big.
As an interface it was fairly simple, using a normal webbrowser in kiosk mode to display the page, and javascript/PHP to fetch and post data.
Wiley E-learning portal
This interface was developed for the use with Wiley’s online text books. It was used as a boilerplate from which to build other branded interfaces to the same service.
7city redesign
The 7city website was a collaborative effort of a great marketing team and web team spanning two continents. However, I took upon myself to update the quite frankly dated 90′s code with tables and images everywhere, in an effort to make the site increase in availability, usability and decrease load times.
The web site design is not something I can take credit for, and not my responsibility to change as I was hired as a code-jockey. However under the hood I did some remarkable changes, that decreased load times on average with 90%, making the pages lightning fast, and also available to people with severe disabilities. Speed was very important in a country where dial up modems where still the most common way to access the internet.
Web site redesign – CompuServe.co.uk
I swear this will be the absolutely oldest piece of web design you will find here. Back in 2000, the CompuServe team consisting of 40 staff were tasked with redesigning the portal for the members of this world spanning Dial up ISP. Unfortunately, the bubble burst officially on September 10th 2001 when we were laid off. Coupled with the events that happened the very next day made me want to showcase exactly what I was doing that day.
I was asked to stay on for the duration and finish off what we had started – but now scaled down so that the portal could be run by a staff of 2 instead of 40.
The old website was very tired and extremely 90′s, so we decided on a new approach – open, colourful and with a great view of all the offers available to our subscribers. Even now when I look back, I think I did a bang up job, considering the technical restraints in those days. Remember – no CSS support to speak of, Internet Explorer 6 had just come out and Netscape was the only other browser available.