Websites
I don't really think I'm qualified to say that I'm a full-on website designer and I definitely can't class myself as a web developer (I live in hope). All I can say is that I have and continue to dabble in this area. Yes, I have set up at least one e-commerce site from an off-the-shelf ASP driven software package and I do still pursue static based websites as a hobby; but I'm a long way off from design house material - which I find a personal shame as I did leave school to study Art & Design and photography.
Any sites I may design in the future (including this one) will be HTML/CSS driven and WC3 compliant but probably won't set the world on fire in terms of eye-candy! If I could jump back to the mid 1990's for a second chance then I would have definitely studied the early server-side technologies that were in their infancy, instead of choosing to pulling PC's apart and fighting with the badly written Windows operating systems! Such is the benefit of hindsight...
Having said all that, I can offer to build websites if the prospective client is prepared to accept simple, functional, semantically structured layouts that conform to WC3 standards. The client must also be prepared to provide:
- The content they wish to display, including all copy.
- An idea of the colour scheme they wish to use, or at the least, one strong base colour that they wish to feature prominently throughout.
- An idea of the layout or site structure, perhaps using an existing website as an example guide.
If you're considering an online presence for your business, then I would highly recommend the advice given by Kevin Partner at NlightN about putting together a website design brief. This is a well thought-out template for you to download and will help you reflect on what you want to achieve with a new website.
