Wednesday, January 30, 2008

A Brave New Venture

As I work towards completing my courses in web design and development, with graduation drawing ever nearer, I’ve got a side project going on for a wife’s coworker. He’s an independent musician and singer, and he wants a new site for all the services he offers from videography to photography to live music. I’ve already made him a new word mark logo, a business card, a 4 by 6 flier and a tri-fold pamphlet, but now comes the harder part: a full-featured site.

It will be my first.

The idea is to have a nice flash intro with footage of him in action, and then an option for a basic HTML/CSS page or a sporadically Flash-flavored page. Originally we were going to go with a blog-style format, but he’s decided he’d rather just link off to his MySpace page and then back to his professional page. So I think we’ll be using the page I build for showcasing his materials and services… which makes my job a whole lot easier and I should be able to focus solely on design.

What’s the point of this post?

1.) I don’t have much to write about today or at all lately in the MMO world.
2.) And I am hoping that some fellow bloggers with knowledge about web design might be able to give me some words of wisdom, or lessons learned as I ramp up into actually designing my 1st full site that’s not just plain old HTML.

So blagosphere… whatcha got for me? Out of the 5 of you who stop by, I’m sure one of you has some perl (pun intended) of wisdom to give unto me.

5 comments:

Tipa said...

Don't under pain of DEATH write your own website from scratch! Takes too long, risk of bugs, usually difficult for the owner to update...

User a content management system (CMS) like Mambo, Joomla or Drupal. You can spend your time making the site look "just right" and little or no time coding.

Bildo said...

Well, building from the ground up is actually what I've been training to do for the past 10 months, so I'm not worried about that aspect.

But I will check out Joomla, Mambo, and Drupal all the same. They may come in handy regardless.

Thanks, Tipa.

Gamer Hudson said...

Totally unrelated I think Keen and Graev got hacked :( Doesn't look too good. I hear ya on the not much to post about, I am going to stick with the oldie but goodie EQ2 until I max out I think. Im tired of leaving that game and not feeling accomplished

Anonymous said...

You might want to check out
http://www.boagworld.com/. A wealth of info there about all aspects of webdesign.

My advice would be to try and keep it simple, yet informative, not too many bells and whistles. You can always build from that.

Thallian said...

Microsoft Expression is a tool you may want, works like Dreamweaver and is 1/8th the price. If you need to do a short flash thing just download the free 30 day trial from Adobe