Web Design
I used to design websites. I also think that if someone is going to do
something they should either do a very good job, or not do anything at
all. There's really no point in half-done or mediocre work. I have always
had a sort of obsession with this and I think it shows. Have a look at
a few examples.
Early Work
Everybody's career has humble beginnings, here are mine:
my first webpage, from way back in the eighth grade
This was for the class project on the history of the Roman empire. The page was made entirely in Microsoft FrontPage (worst web page editor ever. EVER. But good for beginners apparently) on an antique PC.
my second webpage, yet another school project
Writer's block, so to speak, was the cause for this page's lateness. It was
due a full three days before I finished it; I just couldn't think of any interesting
subject. The night before I handed it in I was up late and I looked around my
room and realized that it was a rather interesting place. I built the site to
look like the monitor of an old Apple II computer. It was written entirely on
a very old Mac with BBEdit Lite and all images were taken with a serial-port webcam.
Slightly Later Work
I made no web pages for a while. And then I made more, mostly because the parents
decided to buy a domain name.
glassford.ca, my parents' site
Can you tell that I like simplicity? But it works, doesn't it? It works very
well indeed... None of their individual pages are quite finished yet though.
I then moved on to making my own site, and it has gone through several complete
rewrites since the very first. Here they are, in chronological order:
It was intended to be a temporary page, hence the lack of any kind of style.
This was me beginning to experiment with tables and iframes.
And even more experimentation with tables. New! Improved! With futuristic Hyperlinks!
Oh boy. (No, they don't work, the pages that were supposed to go in them
have been lost to the sands of time. Don't worry, it's progress.)
The next few
And then I got smart and started making actual web pages that looked and worked
like the rest of the internet. Again, chronological order:
Ugly site but nice colour anyway, I suppose
This is me playing with table-style formatting again. Looks okay I guess but nothing special. From April 9th, 2004's backup.
Better site, finally something interesting
So I'm still using tables but this time I have made a border and a background image. Not quite designeresque yet, but getting there. From September 22nd, 2004's backup.
Well I decided to make a page that would look sharp and be compatible with all screen resolutions (800x600 or above, that's like 90% of web users) and using tables I did just that. I think it looks pretty sharp but by this point (October 29th) I was getting a bit tired of boxes. So my solution, apparently, was this:
Alright, so I got bored and couldn't think of anything better to say. My logic, or at least my justification for this page was that if anyone actually managed to stumble upon my tiny slice of the web it was probably about time that they got off the computer and did something useful/healthy/productive/better.
This was the last site revision before the one you're looking at now (Which,
by the way, won't last that long).
Other work
As you can tell by the links in the sites above I have made a few other web
pages. Best ones first:
Amplify 819 Original Design
Amplify 819 Second Design
This site was made for a music promotion and concert organization business. The idea with this was to have it interesting enough to look at and to have it respond well to all browsers under all operating systems. The first one maintains compatibility by staying the same size for every viewer and loads all content into a smaller frame. The second one automatically resizes itself to suit any viewer's resolution.
The website for the University of Ottawa's new Laboratory for Applied Geomatics
and GIS Science. I worked with a friend of mine on this one. He had an idea of
what he wanted the site to look like and a few images that we used. I wrote all
the code and redesigned what needed to be. This
link will take you to their actual site.
And the rest, which were really just design exercises made when I was still
learning the basics. These may need a bit of an explanation I suppose. They are
what I call "splash pages", a sort of online business card providing
a short description of the company, some images and the all-important contact
information. These are great for inexpensively establishing a web presence.
An elegant and simple one-page site, using frames, a bit of creative formatting and some images.
Unfinished. If I could think of more silly things to type as a description it would provide a simple "biography" of the firm to date, as well as contact information.
Historic Architecture Preservation Service
Another unfinished site. It was started late at night as a sort of test, to see
if a functional web page could fit on a small stone wall. Have a look anyway.
The Future
What's next for me, eventually, are what I call "interactive websites", though
that does technically define anything with links. Made entirely in Macromedia
Flash MX, this type of site takes the most time to create and cannot easily be
updated (I would have to open, edit and re-export the flash file every time something
new was to be added.) The upside is that in Flash I can make nearly anything a
moving element or a button. It is also possible to use sounds in these sites.
Consequently this type of site can be the most user-friendly as well as visually
interesting. Flash sites are often used by large companies to showcase new and
upcoming products or past projects in a more interesting way than a normal web
site, though often those annoying introduction movies slow people down. I'll keep
mine short, I promise.
Contact
So, having looked at the online equivalent of your auntie's slide show of her trip to Florida I'm sure you must have some comments. Feel free to drop me an email.