Tuesday 11 August 2009

The Renewal Website

I've been working on the Renewal website for a while now. Partly this is my fault because I work on these things in my spare time and partly it's because the journal is also the result of other people's spare time and theirs is even more precious than mine.

So, some 12 months after I first started working on it, Renewal.Org.UK is now working and has some content on it. More is to come but it's a good start.

The site allows for users to login to view certain articles - there's no charge but you have to submit your email to the site. Other articles are only available in the issues of the journal itself. The colour scheme on each journal is a very striking affair of black, red and a single other colour that changes each year, and the website reflects this depending on the volume you are viewing.

Friday 13 March 2009

Pocus Whiteface Website

I've been working on three new websites recently, though one is in hiatus until it's signed off. In the mean time I took what I learned from designing that site and applied it to the band website, which had been in a 'rough' form for far too long.

The new design is modular and uses PHP 5 and in creating it I already so a load of things I could reapply to the other website to improve on the initial form. Anyway, the Pocus site has been designed to be a very basic, no frills design but with a high level of information.

As such, it has some very obvious key screens: About, News, Gigs, Photos, Videos, Releases, Songs, all of which follow the same basic pattern of a logo at the top and post after post coming along beneath with the information. The font is Courier New right now but I think I'll change it to Garamond in a few minutes; the picking of Courier New was a deliberate attempt to make it look basic and concentrate on the content.

Behind the scenes the structure is clever: songs are added to releases (with notes on the version if necessary) and then reordered so that under each release you can see the songs that are on it in track order and each song is a link back to that song's info. Likewise under each song is a list of all the releases it is on and the videos.

There's some other stuff coming including images of the lyrics in handwritten form and set lists and stuff. It's going to be looking pretty sweet when it's all done.

http://www.pocuswhiteface.com

Thursday 15 January 2009

London Progressive Journal

LPJ has been going for over a year now. You can find it here LondonProgressiveJournal.com

Once it was a one page per issue thing but I recently upgraded the site heavily and it's got a page for each story in an issue. The code is a mess, though, because I don't yet fully understand Rails. I'm going to get back to it at some point soon but first I need to create a new Pocus Whiteface website.

It's been WELL OVER a year since I last posted.

This is quite an amazing thing. Why? I'm rubbish, that's why. What scares me more is the knowledge of how long ago I started this and how quickly 2008 slipped through my fingers. Bugger.