My last term as a fresher saw my group’s collaborative project, Puppet Love, come into fruition. Four of our group presented in front of the whole year of TV, Scriptwriters and IMPs, thankfully I was ‘the website guy’ who just had to push the buttons and make sure everything on-screen happened smoothly (it’s amazing how, even behind a monitor, you suddenly become unable to type or navigate properly).


I find it humbling to look back on my work and see how far I’ve come and how much I’ve learnt. Before the start of this year I had only heard of PHP and Javascript and apart from some copy and paste things, I would not have known where to start coding from scratch. Now I can read PHP, Javascript, Actionscript and am pretty confident at using them to do what I want them to, there’s always trial and error but I feel much more like a web developer and less of an HTML typer. I can’t wait for the next year to begin to learn even more and work with more peopel!


So there we have it folks, the end of the first year. Please do check out my work and see what I achieved with my fellow IMPs, Frank Clark and Lauren Orlowski, they were both wonderful to work with. Happy surfing.

I believe the site’s took taken shape (thank you Julia) and is fully working. If anyone finds any usability bugs please do get in touch, though.

Things I have learnt in the last couple of weeks:

• Some basic PHP
• Some basic Javascript
• How nice (so far) Dreamhost are, even if they do keep trying to sell me a private server.
• The loveliness and forgiving nature of HTML 5
• How the best designs in Photoshop are the accidental ones
• That I actually find it easier to hand code than use Dreamweaver and go through its menus.
• The importance of typography
• The importance of accessibility
• How WordPress works and how to customise templates.

It’s been pretty fun designing this from the ground up and getting back to grips with it all. Everything validates at HTML  5 and CSS 3 apart from my  blog, but I’m working on that. It has two errors because of inline CSS when a gallery is implemented but I’m not sure how much I can influence that or if it’s just WordPress, anyone got any ideas?

I still have to make the kerning on the titles look more natural, they’re all set to a kern of -75 but because of the nature of the waves it makes some letters look much closer to each other so I’ll have the fun task of typing each letter into it’s own layer and aligning them tomorrow!

Hello there,

My site’s taking form nicely. I’ve decided to construct it in HTML 5, the reasons being 1. It shows I’m up with web trends, most modern browsers can render the basic tags I’m using. 2. I want to push both people and browsers to supporting the new standard rather than waiting for 2020 or whenever the W3C believes it’s going to become the de facto. Get in touch if you think that this is a good or bad move. So far all the pages validate apart from the main page because it uses Dreamweaver’s built-in script for the rollover image, I’m sure there are alternatives though so I’ll research that. Interestingly, (for me anyway) I’m still using Espresso as my main editor, I guess mainly because of the really easy FTP access it gives and Quick Upload on save. The fact that it’s so much nicer looking, quicker, and better organised than Dreamweaver, I just wish it had better lazy code writing like Adobe’s beast but it’s a small sacrifice to make tbh.

I’ve got a nice contact form that uses PHP and has basic JavaScript validation with the help of Kirupa and a few Google searches. It’s been quite fun building that portion and learning some PHP and how it works, same with JavaScript, I’ve never managed to get into it and understand it but the more I spend in it’s company the more it’s starting to make sense. Most of the pages now have content and are coming along nicely, a couple of images to spruce things up. Also there’s a custom error page that I’m rather fond of but definitely not the best out there.

I’m still not happy with the design; I can’t get it to look how I want it to be. The only cure is more hours on Photoshop but already I’m tiring of it =p.

The next things for me to do are: complete and upload my CV, build a site map,  build a WordPress theme to make this blog consistent with the site and get the design and colour schemes right.