Showcase
A while back I got an email from a very good mate from my Countesthorpe Community College days. Ellie Saunders is wicked. She’s a great laugh and a good friend. When we shared a subject together, she was grade 10 on about 30 instruments and had written more material than Bach (maybe an exaggeration, but you get the gist). She’s really good. She has an expression when she plays that emotively connects you with the music.
The email in question was asking if I could create her a website to showcase herself as a multi-talented musician. So a few briefs later, a few demos and a bit of PHP framework and we’re off.
Ellie had an idea of how she wanted the site to function. It was to be simple and effective, communicating her skills in a subtle way, almost passive. I kept it minimal whilst trying to make it look fancy, so that people would think about her website. If she has a website, she must be a pro. This was my implementation.
I’m very happy with how it worked out. It does the job well and looks good too. I’ve built it with expandability in mind. Adding images, audio and copy to the site will be easy. I started building this before the Gutteridge family website so it uses the same skeleton. All of it is strict XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1, made for Internet Explorer 7 and Chrome. I don’t personally use Firefox, but it does work (as Firefox is good with standards). I plan on expanding it when more content comes.
My next web projects will be building a better blog and if the band gains some momentum I’ll be doing that up. I love Blogger, but I’ve come to a sad realisation that it’s limited. I want to be able to control everything easily, and I probably could use blogger to do that if I put in the time and effort. But getting used to WordPress or MoveableType seems to be the only answer. Suppose I could build my own CMS, like back in the day. We’ll see.
