All 3 entries tagged Website Redesign

A website 65 million years in the making

Follow-up to It's a whole new paradigm! from The randomness of tomorrow, today!

I've finally finished the new design for richardwinskill.co.uk. It's only taken me 3 years...

Of course I hardly did anything to it in those three years; if you add up all the time I actually spent working on it, it's probably less than a week.

I was originally making a design similar to the final version; it had a coloured gradient at the top and the "menu" section was much more cluttered. That stayed hidden for the first year (maybe a little less) before i decided - finished or not - it still looked nicer then the old design, so released it as a "beta" version. It stayed there without much work being done to it for the next 2 years.

Then, a few months ago (February, I think), I finally started working on it again. Except I decided it wasn't good enough, so I started again from scratch. Of course I then stopped working on it again, but yesterday evening I decided to finish it off; the design was basically finished, it was just a matter of moving the old pages over.

So I think I've finally finished everything that needed doing, and have uploaded the new files. The new design is hosted on a different server, so it is entirely possible that you will still see the "old new" design until DNS catches up (I have a new hosting company, and have been moving site over for the past few months; I don't know about you, but my computer (or possibly my ISP; DNS isn't one of my strong points) insists on sticking with the old details for an annoyingly long time - I have to activate Tor to make sure the transfer has worked properly...).

So, if you see a gradient and pill-shaped buttons, that's the "old new" design; if you see a curved top and bottom, that's the "new new" design, and is the one you should be seeing...

: 27 May 2008 04:33 |  Tags: Randomness Richardwinskill Dot Co Dot Uk Website Redesign |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Flash! A–ah!

Writing about web page http://vpi.net/

Dilbert.com has just had a redesign, so I decided to complain about how bad the website of the designers is. Each main point has sub-points*.

1. It appears to be entirely Flash-based. This is a bad thing:
   • I can't middle click on anything; well, I can but it achieves nothing. If I want to open a link in a new tab, dammit, who are you to stop me?
   • My scroll wheel doesn't work in the sections that have scroll bars.
   • The "Request a quote" button keeps animating. This is annoying; I don't want a damn quote, and no amount of swooshing is going to change my mind.
   • When I point at "Our Work", some more links slide into view. When I move down to "Clients", the options disappear and I end up pointing at "Our Demo"...
   • Pages take too long to load; without flash I'd at least be able to read some text while images continued loading.
   • Loading new Flash pages doesn't appear to trigger Firefox's progress bar, so it looks like nothing's happening when i look at the place I usually look to see if anything's happening.
   • Since the content never stands still, there is no guarantee that the Home page does not clearly identify what the company actually does.
   • If you disable Flash, the plain text version that replaces the Flash one is rather boring. If they hadn't used Flash in the first place, the "proper" website would be interesting. It also isn't even finished...
   • There's probably more, but I'm sick of the website...

Also I can't see any prices anywhere; not even "ballpark" figures. I don't want to "request a quote"; I want concrete or rough figures now.

(I feel I should point out that I have nothing against Flash itself; when used as part of a webpage (as with YouTube and their videos) it's fine. The problem comes when the entire website is Flash.)

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* There is only one main point; everything that's wrong with the website stems from that one mistake.

: 20 Apr 2008 00:09 |  Tags: Bad Thing Dilbert Flash Randomness Rant Vpi Web Design Website Redesign |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

It's a whole new paradigm!

I've always wondered what that meant…

Anyway, recently I've been looking at the examples at CSS Drive and I've decided my website needs a more exciting design. It'll probably happen over the Summer and, since I've been using my blog so much, I think I will abandon my policy of an impersonal personal website and have my blog featuring more prominantly on the new site.

Watch this space! Well actually, watch this space…

: 09 May 2005 03:28 |  Tags: Randomness Richardwinskill Dot Co Dot Uk Website Redesign |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem