Web Design Project

I have just finished a website I was working on for a client, the client in question  being Hillside Community Church in Ballymena. This is my girlfriend Louise’s church and she was the official person I had to deal with to develop the site. Talk about nightmare clients She was a great client, very efficient at pointing out things that needed fixing and emailing me seven pages of changes. Seriously though she was very good at getting me the content for the site in really good time, which helped a lot. (@Louise happy now? I have mentioned you by name in my blog)

As well as the site design I had to go one Sunday during a service to get some generic photographs for the site, people milling around, praise, outside etc.

Anyway the point is go and have a wee look and tell me what you think, I’m hoping to use the experience from this to help with a larger project I have coming up soon.

People with no interest in web design look away now.

I was mostly given free reign with the design of the site and designed the site from a blank page up. I find this allows for more creative designs as you are not limiting yourself by technology.

Developed initial idea

From the drawings, the site was then built up in Adobe Illustrator to create high quality mock-ups to show the client.

High quality mock-up to show the client.

Once the design was finalized it was split into individual images and marked up in Dreamweaver CS3, hand coding XHTML and CSS.

I used Dreamweaver as it has built in FTP and can update links globally if pages are moved around, although I find it doesn’t display CSS layouts properly.
PHP includes were used for the navigation and the site was tested using Wamp server and tested in Firefox 3, Opera 9, Google Chrome, IE7 and IE 6. I didn’t test for Safari as I don’t have a mac (yet) although if it works in Firefox it will work in Safari.

I am aware that some of the pages don’t validate on the W3C validator, I will fix this if I have time. Though as the problems don’t affect the sites performance or appearance I may or may not fix it. The CSS validates though.