Although I'm first and foremost a musician, web design is another side to my creative and commercial work. I first became involved about 10 years ago when I needed a site for my band and realised that what I had in mind was going to cost a small fortune! Once I'd mastered what I needed and completed the site other commissions came along, and I began a second career as a web designer.
I specialize in sites for artists of all kinds, and like to make them clean, simple and elegant. Most of my sites are designed to be administered almost entirely by the client themselves, so they're not tied to me for future additions and can update them from any location.
This was the first website I designed, built entirely in Flash with an option to jump to the artist's Myspace page if the plug-in is not available. The site features audio clips of all the bands work and a Paypal section that allows users to purchase CDs online.
The client wanted a clean, elegant interface for displaying and selling their felt goods. They also wanted sound effects and subtle, cinematic transitions between images so we chose Flash as the medium. All content is drawn from a mySQL database which the client administers themselves via their site admin panel, so there are no maintenance costs. The site features a Flash shopping cart offering on-line payment via Paypal.
The client already had a website, and wanted to add Paypal shopping cart functionality to it. I designed a PHP-based Paypal shopping cart which derives its contents from the clients Excel-based catalogue - he just uploads it and the contents update.
The brief was to keep this clean, simple and beautiful, and make a site that could be updated by the client from anywhere in the world. I designed a server-based admin panel that would do this, using a combination of PHP and XML. The decision to use XML for the database enabled me to keep the cost to the client to an absolute minimum as they wouldn't have to pay annually for more expensive mySQL-based web hosting.
We received a lot of good feedback for Hannah's site, and Yuki contacted me wanting something along the same lines. The basic format is similar, but I updated the admin panel code to allow payments and pre-bookings via Paypal.
This was an unusual one. The client wanted a fun, friendly and edible looking site that they could maintain entirely by themselves from home, but also add to. As they had a mac I created a site for them using Apple's iWeb software, which was then very simple to edit and extend as much as they wished using the template provided.
This was a job which, for unforseeable reasons, never reached completion. A lot of work went into the preliminary designs however, so I've included it here just to fill out the picture of my work. The original brief was quite ambitious, featuring a full-on iTunes-style music player which you can just see the beginnings of here.
This is a site that was completed but never went live; another casualty of the myspace! This married together a few of the things I'd worked on previously - a secure admin panel that could be updated from any cyber cafe in the world, an XML database, and a Flash-based website that could take the XML and dynamically display it. All working here except the forum.