If I spent as much time writing posts for this site as I do redesigning it…

After reviewing the previous design over a period of time, and listening to comments made by some of my friends, it was time for some design tweaks.

Gone are the rounded corners and grey headers. Now there’s sexy gradients and borders. There’s also a splash of colour (orange and green) to offset the heavy use of blue.

The biggest change is to the links pages. These now use the feeds from my new Delicious account, which makes it insanely easy for me to share the cool stuff I find on the interweb. The only problem now will be the amount of cool stuff I find. I think some bi-monthly pruning may be required to remove all the ‘fluff’.

The old links pages and Weekly Round-up posts have been removed and their links moved across to Delicious. The Daily Reading and a new Friends category have been placed in the blog sidebar, which means Leyton should stop pestering me about linking to his site.

This still leaves the problem of me actually writing some posts… So the future plan is to create some summary posts on a variety of topics so that this site will become my own quick reference guide. The first few posts will be MySQL based and cover storage engines, datatypes, query optimisations and other goodies.

My first solo web design gig is now live!

Ayerst Environmental are an asbestos consultancy based on the outskirts of London. They wanted a revamping of their original (and very dated) site along with the ability to modify the content themselves.

After investigating a couple of different approaches, I decided on using WordPress for the backend of the site. The main reasons for this were my previous experience with WordPress and it’s ease of use. I felt a “full blown” CMS would be overly complicated both in terms of setting up and future maintenance. The KISS principle certainly applies in this case.

The result is a clean and consistent design with content that can be easily updated when needed.

Yesterday saw the release of my latest project, 1343 (East Grinstead) Sqn, a website for my ATC squadron.

Seeing as there are already a ton of sites that provide information on the Air Training Corps generally (not least the main Air Cadet website), I wanted to go for a more local approach and concentrate on what we do as a squadron.

The aim is to post on the activities and events the squadron attends, along with general squadron related news and announcements, and the occassional general interest piece.

The site won’t win any design awards but then that’s not the aim. Content is king, and the simple, clean design will allow that content to shine through.

The finishing touches will be going in over the next week or so. Primarily adding a few pictures to break-up the text, along with a photo gallery for a more visual representation of what the cadets get up to.