Software Website Design

This is a site I've made for my sister, Lucy's birthday. She's really getting into her painting now and wanted somewhere to show them off and perhaps sell a few. It was meant to be a really simple blog but she kept changing her mind so as a result I kinda gave up on those two buttons and just bodged them in for now as they will be changing (a proper about and contact page, tag cloud/category list and some other bit's n pieces.)

I think the overall style turned out good though, so I'm happy and she loves it because "it's all pretty and flowery and pink".

Yes I know it's borked in ie6, I've only got around to testing in FF and IE7. I'm presuming that opera and safari are okay for now. Actually... I'm not sure I can be bothered to update it so it works... Anyone using IE6 still should be taught a lesson. It's not like this is a high class website for millions of users

 

Happy Birthday to your sister.

That website looks damn good - her mario painting/drawing is good too, well suited to a "nerd"...

 

Aww bless

Like the site design, nice and approachable, although slightly slow on first view.

EDIT: Happy Birthday to her

 

Happy Birthday - and wow, cool Mario

 

Aye, it's got a whacking great big 114KB image in there (among others). I will properly optimise them when I get around to sorting out the navigation.

She painted me a classic mini last year which is ****ing awesome! I'll get her to post that up.

 

Looks cracking, Will. Good job.

 

will, out of interest, are you a professional designer or is this a hobby still?

 

Tis a living. Was a hobby though. I was going to be a games computer! But then I realised I couldn't really be bothered with the maths.

 

Very cool. The only thing I would change is the appearance of the links under the Categories menu.

 

Great work. Design has always been a killer for me when I'm working on websites... I can do magical things with CSS, but never know what magic needs working

 

Aye. All that is going to change to a more artsy look. I'm going to draw some icons for each category that she makes. Those buttons were a very last minute change so I've not bothered yet.

I find desiging much harder too. Mr last job got me out of practice though so with this new one I should get better as time goes on. I think the hardest part is the content layout - making it look interesting but still functional.

 

Really like that design will. good work as usual.

 

Cheers

 

Awesome job, will. I quite like it! As mentioned, the contacts need updating. But the rest of it is awesome.

 

Thanks

I've updated it a bit now. Lucy has also been adding a load more posts so the site looks much fuller now.

http://www.lucyblackmore.co.uk/index.php

Jamie helped me out with some javascript on the categories tab. Much better now.

 

OK now it looks better, not that it looked bad of course

great work Will

 

that is one nice looking site there will, just a quick note, it seems to take a while to load, what is the optimization like?

 

Really nice looking site! Where did u get the background image?

 

Pretty much nothing at the moment. Those JPG's are hoooge! It's next on my list though. (I've actually noticed that other sites I have on the same hosting are slow as well though so I'm wondering if it's not just the sites fault.)

Various different assets came from www.sxc.hu and a couple from www.istockphoto.com. Everything else I drew my self. The wooden background though was actually a google image search that brought up a guy with a small texture website with some really good textures which makes me annoyed that I haven't bookmarked it.

 

Really lovely.
U are great!
There's an improvement suggestion:
Can you set bg wood board against nature scenery? I mean, the wood board can actually be viewed as a wall, and you can see the green plants (blurred, 'cos out of focus) outside just thru the wood-made wall... that would be fantastic...
(Hope i explained it clearly.)