I recently completed another affordable website design for a client, which you can see at www.tideservices.co.uk.

This was quite a straightforward job; although the original company role was the installation of roller shutters to shops & bakeries, they have branched out into many more fields over the last few years, but wanted all of this covered by a 5 page site!!

This was the only issue as far as designing the site was concerned…..the company performs about a dozen different functions – how to get that into a 5 page site. Luckily, I was able to separate the navigation into 2 sections on the homepage – Industrial doors & building maintenance down the side as the 2 main functions of the company & some sub headings horizontally across the page too, highlighting particular products!

Once all the information was collated from the client, the site made good headway & the client is very pleased….I can say this because he wants me to work on another site for him & has referred me to a relative who runs a wedding planning business!!

Always nice to be appreciated :o)

It’s been sometime since I blogged about web design work that I’ve been doing – is there any time in-between affiliate marketing for other things?!!! :oO  Well, I suppose I have to earn some money to pay for the advertising, which sometimes seems like a bottomless pit!

A few months ago, I was asked to build a website for Change Social Care – a London based recruitment agency, with over 20 years experience specialising in the recruitment of quality Social Care Professionals & Administration and Secretarial Staff for Public and Private Sectors.

The budget for the job was around £300, even though the site took some time to complete, due to the regular re-writing of the content :o/  But, the site was finally completed to the satisfaction of the client & has been up & running now for some months.

I was contacted recently by an advertising agency, to build a 3 page website within a couple of days! They supplied all the copy & the site was built & uploaded on schedule, at a cost of just £100! The site www.mediatalent.co.uk is pretty basic, but looks fine & what do you expect for £100?!!!!

The major project I’ve been working on for some time has been for Roberts Roofing, a London roofing contractor working on projects worth £4 million last year! So, the pressure was on with this site!! They already had a website, built by the company itself, but wanted it brought up to date & modernised.

The new site was designed with a great deal of CSS and was constructed to emphasise the projects they have worked on, showing decent quality images of them. They wanted clean, simple lines & all relevant information to be available within a few clicks of each other, whilst removing a lot of the personalisation that had existed on the original site.

The site has finally been finished & the client is VERY pleased with it – so am I :o)

I was just doing some work on the homepage of My Travel Extras, adding a top 10 London hotels widget & got it fitted in nicely with the other hotel & short break content on the page.

I use Firefox for web browsing & the page looked great viewed through it. Of course, every good web designer knows that you must test your site in different browsers, so I fired up IE7 and lo & behold, the page looks a complete mess!!! >:o/

Internet Explorer drives me mad – the page looks perfect in Firefox & Opera, but the web browser 75% of surfers use is the one that isn’t web standards compliant & has to have it’s problems worked around to build a site!

Microsoft promises that Internet Explorer 8 will be web standards compliant – I certainly hope so! In the meantime it’s back to the drawing board to try & get the page to work in ALL browsers – grrrrr!

Finally got it licked – two and a half hours later!!!! But at least it now works in Safari too, for all those MAC users :o)