It’s been a good twelve months since the MWP website had a make-over; and although it’s still wearing the same WordPress undies (rinsed out in the sink though – what do you take us for?) there’s an all new look and feel to celebrate my first successful year as a freelancer.

Things have been gone well this year even if I do say so myself, I’ve worked on over twenty projects. Websites for the pharmaceutical, healthcare, media and tourism industries as well as a number of touch-screen multimedia installations at various Museums and Visitor Centres up and down the country.

I suppose it’s been an odd year to start a business, what with t’old credit crunch and all that malarkey. Not that it’s seemed to effect us too much to be honest – it seems like our backgrounds, portfolios and contacts have stood us in good stead. Our clients have been reporting being pleasantly surprised when receiving our costs, certainly when compared to quotes received from other agencies. The fact that we’re small, agile and have little or no overheads except a world-class web host so that we can pass these savings on to our clients seems to be a concept that’s worked very well indeed. We’ve delivered some big projects, at a cost most agencies wouldn’t get out of bed for. Not only that, but we’ve done very nicely for ourselves and enjoyed the summer sun too. Result!

So what’s with the big long page dude?

Experimentation really; browsing the traffic stats for madewithpixels has always caused some worry, Seemingly suffering from an exceptionally high bounce rate, I wanted to do something to make the content more focussed, accessible and inviting to read.

Admittedly; there was an awful lot of content on the old site. Lots of words and explanations that clearly no-one was reading. So the design rationale slowly became; why make people navigate at all? There’s not that much to see other than a few pics and a bit of blurb about our approach -Spreading the site out over tens of pages simply makes the user expend so much more effort: Click > Read > Decide > Click > Read etc.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see to find out whether it was a good decision or not – I’m mindful about the effect on SEO as the page is now well over 1500 lines of HTML when rendered and with 50 or so embedded images it does take a little while to load. Suffice to say I’ll be keeping my eyes on those stats especially as Google has announced that page load times are to affect page ranks results in its ‘quality score algorithm’.

So I hope you enjoy the new garb. And I’m pleased to report that for once, I’m actually one hundred percent happy with the result! Never an easy thing to achieve when designing your own site somewhat strangely.

It’s all about the grid baby

The eagle eyed designers among you may spot how lovely and tight the grid and vertical rhythm of the typography is.

I hope, at some point in the not too distant future to publish a post I’ve been working on for a while. There are LOTS of great articles out there on grid based layout, but very few with any real practical examples or design rationale from the designers responsible – I’m lucky to have been taught the skill at college in the late eighties but it’s a skill that seems to have slipped past most educators radars since then so I thought I’d dissect a few of my designs and post the results. Watch this space!

And I’d just like to thank…

As always, the most excellent Jon Ward (dude, get that site built… I know you’re busy but I’m sick of not linking to you) for the totally bodacious custom lightbox and smooth as a babies bum javascript page-scrolling sorcery. Without his continued help and downright genius; my designs would remain somewhat static.

Given the hand-drawn nature of ay-pe’s latest and greatest project; an animated flip-book telling the story of the cultural history at Clitheroe Castle. Ay-pe asked if we could reflect the look and feel of their AV production and bring some movement to the page.

Initially, we discussed Adobe Flash (no) and  Javascript animation, but finally settled on a much simple, subtler and; I think, more elegant approach given that the content of the page no t the background deserved to be hero.

Those readers that follow the web-design community closely will have noticed a new trend for parallax backgrounds. There have been a few notable examples recently. The Rissington Podcast and Clearleft’s ‘Silverback‘ to name but two (with an excellent tutorial on how to recreate the effect by Carsonified here).

So; some brown paper, a few fluffy clouds, one friendly Owl and a lovely Quicktime movie were winged over by carrier duck (this is Sheffield pal) and we set to work implementing the effect. I’ll not wax lyrical here about the techniques. It’s all been articulated much better than I ever could on the Carsonified tutorial noted above.

I’ll just a big thank-you very much to the Sir or Madam that was crazy enough, drunk or both to have been messing around with CSS minus margins and wildly re-sizing their browser window!

Odd? Yes. Useful? Very!

Creswell Crags on the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire borders is one of the most important archaeological sites in Europe and is currently working towards ‘World Heritage’ Status – a label that would see it ranked alongside historical luminaries such as Stonehenge and the Pyramids.

A Limestone Gorge, Cave System, Country Park, Wildlife Reserve, Museum and Visitor Attraction; Creswell Crags, it’s object collections, research, exhibitions and website are supported (most notably) by the British Museum, who’s curator of pre-history; Jill Cook had a large hand in conceiving and planning. In the early nineties I’d worked on the team that put the original site and its award winning content together. Now, more than ten years later – we’d get to improve upon the design, enhance the content and introduce some new ideas of our own.

Take something great, and make it better.

Some excellent re-branding work had been produced by Sumo in Newcastle, along with some suggestions for what the site may eventually look like. We took those early concept visuals and built on the thinking, applying our expertise and beginning to firm up the specification that much to the clients surprise; had a much richer feature set than they’d ever imagined considering their modest budget.

Using Teleriks Sitefinity CMS we delivered a fully managed website that included full ‘in-page’ content management. News and Events sections. Community message boards and polls; and a blog for the Creswell Team to talk about life at the Crags. Integration with Google maps provides a ‘rich media layer’ to head up the site – supporting local businesses by providing relevant ‘places to eat, drink and stay’ information to users wishing to visit the Museum and get a wider view of the surrounding countryside.

Still to come

The feather in the cap, is the integration with the Museums offline object database. Containing hundreds of thousands of objects, scattered far and wide across the country in various public and private collections; the Creswell object database is a goldmine of archaeological information and an incredibly important data set for education and historical research.

Using the Microsoft .NET development framework, we’ve set about creating a connection between desktop and internet that will bring the entire collection of objects to the world wide web. Keep your eyes peeled on the site for updates, but in the meantime you can search the Creswell Object Database as it stands so far: Human Skulls, Bison, Bear, Wolves and Hyena bones all found in rural Derbyshire… Crikey!

You, the reader (ha!) may be forgiven for being less than enthusiastic about this little corner of t’world wide t’interweb. Especially were you to be expecting relevant, cutting commentary, satire and repartee regarding the state of play for graphic designers in todays digital marketplace. In fact I’m ashamed to admit that the obligatory madewithpixels weblog is now more than twelve months old and contains no more than a few rambling posts from my tired old mind about subjects as closely related to graphic design as I am to Genghis Khan.

All change: destination. The future.

Suddenly; everything has changed; and It’s only fair to say that we’ve only gone and thinked the unthunkable…

So without further ado: I’m pleased to announce that Mr Jon Ward esquire; kitty-cat afficianado and all round good-guy and I have finally made the jump and are embarking on our own little foray into the murky waters of the web agency ocean.

Baiting our metaphorical hooks with the hopes and dreams of a brighter, more accessible, easier to use web future; and casting our rods with a renewed glee that has taken us both by surprise.

So far, it seems to be working very well thanks.

There are plenty of little fishies (and some bigger ones) in our little fishy** bucket and we’re looking forward to finding out whether our slant on things works as well as we think it might.

So I guess all that’s left to say is ‘check back soon’. When there’s news, you’ll find it here. Perhaps there might even be some of that promised commentary and repartee? We’ll see

** Please note. At no point do we intend to bash our clients on the heads and place them in a bucket for consumption later.