my work
making invisible
Every website should have a purpose. Rarely should the purpose be to showcase a website design for visitors to marvel and wonder over.
More common purposes include linking customers with information they want to know, entertaining them with great content or selling a product.
The website's design and implementation should support these goals. If it does its job properly it should be beautiful enough that a visitor won't even notice it. I believe the design should almost be invisible.
An invisible portfolio, however, is pretty useless. So allow me a few moments to lift the camouflage from a selection of my sites...
letting visitors flow through the site
It's dangerous to disrupt the flow of an artist, but online galleries are so frequently a pain to browse that art lovers rarely get a chance to enter such a state when surfing the web. Navigation of portfolios usually involves clicking on minute thumbnail-images one at a time, waiting for the full size image to load and then for an animation to complete. It looks great, but the art plays second fiddle to the site's design.
For the site of artist Julia Quance, I made designing a smooth navigation flow a priority. Each gallery is simply a page that the visitor scrolls from top to bottom. While they are at the top of the page, the lower images are loading so there is little waiting time. Navigation is intuitive because it follows common practices on the web.
At the bottom of each gallery, I provided a menu of all the other galleries on the site. This is navigation when the user needs it. No need to hit the browser's back button, no need to scroll elsewhere on the page... just a simple choice when the visitor expects there to be a choice.
The most gratifying part of any design process is to watch people use it successfully. Without the addition of the gallery menu at the bottom of the screen, I found people revealed a hint of frustration and looked at less images. With the addition, they typically looked at every single gallery on the site.
good design needs good custom code
I consider myself to be a designer, but it would probably be more accurate to call me an interaction designer. I don't just set out to make things look pretty. Making your site look good is more of a by-product of creating a clean, easy to understand experience that your customers will... hopefully ignore!
To achieve this result, it's frequently necessary to jump into the computer code.
My code editor is where I spent the majority of my time for Anglian Confidential; a company which holds important documents in a secure facility. Working alongside Design Tab we created a system which allowed customers to track their documents and request for them to be couriered back to them or securely destroyed. The system also kept track of documents from Anglian Confidential's point of view.
One of the main tasks was to connect the customer with various bits of information about the state of their account and the location of their documents. This involved providing filters on tables of data to allow customers to narrow down what they were looking for and a search box for use if they knew the name of a document.
Designing this involved dynamically creating the queries that pulled information out of the database and then presenting it to the user. I made sure the queries provided accurate results and optimised them so they ran fast. Fast is great for the user because they don't have to wait so long, but it is also means the web server has less work to do, which saves you money on the hardware that runs your site.
extra reliable for your visitors
Unreliable software can cost a company money, and there are few things more annoying. One of those few things is when something doesn't work on a wedding day. As wedding videographers, Bubbly Productions had to give their customers the confidence that they could be relied on to do a great job. It was important that they were seen to take care of the details even on their website.
When researching my client's competition I discovered how many failed to portray this reliable image on their website. For example, many of their competition had portfolio videos that didn't play on the majority of computers simply because of the video format they had chosen. It's easy to forget that something that works on one machine can fail to work for other people. The portfolio video on Bubbly Productions uses Flash video because it works for nearly 100% of website users.
sometimes compromises can pay
One of the benefits of a custom solution is the ability to push boundaries in areas which would cost too much to implement otherwise.
For the Insecurity Guard website I took advantage of this fact to provide a simplified and more intuitive user interface for updating content.
Not only is the editor customised specifically for the design of the site, but it also takes account of the fact that I knew my client would be using a modern browser. This allowed me to forgo the time it would have taken to workaround bugs in Internet Explorer, shaving days off of development time and making it a cost effective option.
and sometimes we can afford to seek perfection
For single small projects, writing elegant, reusable code is unfortunately too expensive. The expense simply cannot be justified.
By working with open source software I have the opportunity to take high quality existing code, make changes so that it fits the exact requirements of a project and then give back any improvements I have made so that others can build on it.
Working with open source grants us the greatest advantages of security, flexibility, peer review, customisation and saves time on a project by project basis.
By specialising in one open source software project (Drupal) and helping to improve it, I get to learn the software backwards, influence its future direction and work with some of the most talented software developers in the industry.
Are we a good fit?
If I've kindled your interest, you may be wondering if we should work together.
The key to what I do is to spend the time to understand your company and your customers, so that I can provide a solution which is custom fit and specifically tailored to your needs.
Of course, we won't really know if we are a good match until we have a conversation, so if you want to explore this further step on over to my contact page.