Personal creations
It wasn't long after I started using the internet on a regular basis that I started to experiment with building web pages. From then on I've built several sites along the way, each time learning something new.
Verico One Mortgage Corp.
The Verico One Mortgage Corp. website was the first website that I have built on my own time without having met the customer until after the site was live. I was made aware that the site was requiring a lot of work from a family member who work at the business. Upon reviewing the site fully I returned with a 3 stage plan to redevelop the site, all communication throughout this build was via email and instant messenger.
The first stage was to re-code the front-end of the site to remove the untidy and bulky table-based layout, and replace it with a more efficient, and more accessible CSS-based layout. The second stage was to rebrand the website so that it once again matched the rest of the business. The third stage is to migrate the site onto a Content Management System to allow total control of the site content and better flexibility for the client.
The first two stages of the projects ended up blending into one, as it was when I had almost completed Stage 1 that the final details for the rebrand came through. Thankfully, by this time the pages had all been rebuilt with the CSS-based layout and styling so the rebrand was a very quick and painless process.
AquaCleanUK.com
This site was created for a friend to support his new window cleaning business, I've worked with him before on several web based projects so had a good idea of what his expectations were. As this was the first site for his new business, nothing had been decided in terms of logo or final colours, his only requirement was that the site had to be predominately blue in colour, everything else remained up to me.
Update 14/04/2005: The site has now been partially re-branded from Squeaky Clean 4 U to Aqua Clean, as my friend felt his business needed a more professional sounding name. Unfortunately he was quite insistent that the wording on the logo be "bright red" despite my appeals.
EssexProperties.net
The Essex Properties project was one where the focus was much more on the functionality of the site than the design of it. This was to be the comapny's first website, and the thing they wanted most from it was to be able to maintain a list of properties on the site themselves. After looking at a few possible solutions I settled on using an Open Source PHP/MySQL based system to power the site. Unfortunately though, the system, by default, was only set up to handle the sale of properties, so I spent a fair bit of time customising this so that it could handle the posting of property rentals.
The actual design of the site is based upon what is used on their business cards.