It seems that my passion for building and designing sites has been reinvigorated since the launch of sgBEAT, and over this last month or so I’ve been actively redesigning a few of my own sites, mostly for fun. I designed a couple more too, so I’ll be talking about them here as well.
Expression
Despite the module ending ages ago and leaving me with a horribly unflattering grade, I felt the need (probably as a result of the grade) to redesign Expression, hopefully to infuse it with some semblance of decent design. I admit the previous design was atrocious, and probably sloppy, so I was more than happy to tear down the old site and put in its place something better.
Just for kicks, I decided to build the site on a single HTML file, layering all the contents in divs, and using Javascript to facilitate the browsing of the content. It worked quite well, and I added in a few jQuery elements to reduce the static nature of this online portfolio. I manually built a simple replica of the Coda Slider using basic jQuery too, and uploaded the complete soft copies of my printed portfolio (albeit in a much smaller size) to allow the viewing using the slider.
The content was already present from the previous version of the site, so there was no need to add anything. I chose a clean dark grey design, without any particular reason why, and I think it turned out pretty well, presenting a sort of metallic look to the site. Took me a couple of days to fully implement the new layout, but I’m a lot happier with the new design.
OrangeOasis
I had never really been satisfied with the initial design of OrangeOasis, although to be honest there wasn’t really much content to put on the site. However, I set about to redesign it and without an intent of minimalism this time round. I didn’t want to go with white, and in the end settled on a much darker colour scheme while still maintaining the lead colour of orange.
The grey is roughly similar to that of Expression, but the layout is more structured with a navigation bar and footer. The site is still in its simplistic state lacking in any more content than what was already there, and I intend to carry on pursuing the redesign in the coming weeks. I also intend to add more services to OrangeOasis, although I’ve had slight difficulty prioritising which one I should work on next.
Your Financial Planner
I did this site over a weekend for my friend who’s a financial planner, and basically I was suggesting to him that he should try to create an online presence in order to market himself better. Furthermore, having a site would also be able to serve as a landing page for potential customers who intend to find out more about financial planning.
This site was really fun to do, mostly because it was trivial and allowed a great deal of freedom for experimentation. It’s also not really a formal site, and I tried to design it to leave a vivid impression on viewers. I chose yellow and gold as the main colours because they sort of reflect that of money, and I made the layout of the site as uncluttered as possible.
There’s only two pages on the site currently (hence justifying the ease of development), and one thing I’m particularly glad I did was to implement a simple contact me form for viewers who want to find out more. It was trivial work too, but I think it’s good that I’m able to regularly practice developing features like this.
Tutorific
The last site which I had the pleasure of designing and developing is Tutorific, in which I’ve described in much length in my last post. This was done over a much longer time, nearly two weeks, mainly because of the time spent tying in the login and sign up system of OrangeOasis, not to mention the inclusion of an external account system for the undergraduates of other local universities.
I’ve been slowly adding minuscule features to improve the usability of the site, but mainly more work has gone into designing an administrative interface that would allow my friend and I to use the site more effectively. There’s definitely a lot of room for further iterations and improvements, and with any luck I’ll be able to find time to get down to it over the next couple of weeks.
And so it has been at least four sites that I’ve been working on in this past month or so (five if you include sgBEAT, although admittedly I’ve done little design work since the Beta launch). I’ll be coming up with a few more hopefully before school starts, and as always I’m excited about starting new web development projects.
Tags: Expression, OrangeOasis, sgBEAT, Tutorific, Web Design, YourFinancialPlanner
