Project Number 2

The second project I have for this summer is to update and redesign my friend's website. He is currently studying acting at the University of Northampton and has had his website for almost a year now. As he only knows some basic HTML, he used templates and pre-designed applications to make up the content for his website including a gallery and a blog.

He doesn't pay for the hosting as as a limitation of the free package, you are allowed to use their applications but they have no support for scripting languages such as PHP. This prevents you from designing your own applications to replace them. Overall, the best way to describe the layout of the site is that it's a bit higgledy piggledy as my gran would say. Those elements that have been pre-designed look fine on their own but don't really fit in with the rest of the site and those bits that he has coded himself / filled in a template are just a bit out of alignment.

As such he decided a redesign was needed. As I had the summer relatively free, I decided to help and today we have got a big chunk of it done. The biggest problem I face when designing websites is the arty side of things. I'm not great with Photoshop and much prefer using Fireworks which for the most part suits my needs very well. When it comes to actually thinking about what it should look like, I get a little bit stuck. We seemed to agree to keep the black theme from his previous site but black on its own is far too dark and it needs an injection of colour to give it some life and attract the users attention - after all, that's partly what websites are for, promoting the information they hold.

I should probably mention that you can see his site at http://www.wayne-ingram.co.uk. Keep an eye on it so that you can see the finished result in comparison to the old version. I will probably post some comparative pictures up here when we're done.