September 12th, 2008
I have completed the production and implementation of a new site design for Matt Wreford, which can now be viewed on the website at http://www.mattwreford.com/, with only a few significant changes to my initial idea.
I have based the site on Wordpress, using it as a Content Management System allowing for the quick adding of portfolio entries and amendments.
Essentially the pages have been used for each section with their own templates, and posts can be categorised so that they will fall into each of the three portfolio sections and with a bit of PHP will display in the right portfolio page.
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August 31st, 2008
Having received some images and instructions on content, I am quite pleased with the way the design is going. Here is a screenshot of the Home page, featuring simply his three rules:
It is still featuring the fluid two column layout where both sides expand and keep the content in the centre, and the tabbed menu holds itself at top right.
August 21st, 2008
My finishing of the 4,000 word writeup essay will essentially be marking the end of my placement year, an experience for which am thankful to Martyn and all the great people I have met during the course of the year for such a brilliant time.
On the Essay
As for writing it, fortunately I kept a document of running commentary on what I was doing throughout the year so compiling this into an essay has been reasonably straightforward. It has been rather pleasing to be able to look back on where I started at and compare it to where I have ended up.
August 8th, 2008
We spent the start of this week transferring our furniture across the corridor to a new, more studio-like unit.
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July 25th, 2008
I thought I would try and make some category images for the main shop categories for the Ocean Addict site, and here are some of the first ones:
I felt vector images better suited the general style of the site, since previous graphics like the SAS Beach Cleanup image looked so good the moment it was planted in the sidebar.
June 28th, 2008
I have started work on a new design for http://www.mattwreford.com/, the owner of which felt that his existing site wasn’t really up to scratch. Knowing only that the client likes very simple and minimal designs, here is a screenshot of my initial layout and general concept for the site.
It will be quite a simple structure of 5 pages (four plus a link to a CV download) as requested, tabbed, and with two main content columns that serve different purposes on each page. For the CSS aspect of this design I have experimented with fluid column widths on both sides, where the content is grouped clearly in two blocks but they centre and expand within their columns with the resizing of the page.
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June 7th, 2008
I completed this design a while back, but the original design concept image I posted up still seems to get a fair amount of interest so here is a finished (but not the final agreed) version of the logo for the site as well.
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May 31st, 2008
I have felt a little bit discontented with the way the Ocean Addict site has been going from an architectural point-of-view, particularly since adding the shop which is using the ancient system of OSCommerce and its flakey table-based layout and template system. The Ocean Addict site was always going to be an online store but initially started off as a related news and information blog with the view to expanding it. However my choice of using a blog as the core of the site (even one as expandable as Wordpress), and knowing very little about what open source CMS’s have to offer, is looking more and more limiting.
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The flash actionscript behind this is flexible enough to allow for any size
puzzle to be created and jumbled as many times as I like. In addition to this,
the difficulty of rotating pieces is also a feature.