Websites that have been Done In Style!

Dyas Consulting came to me as a referral from LinuxNJ.com. Mr. Dyas had hired another web designer and ended up with a poorly functioning web design that did not at all suit the tone of the consulting business. The design he had ended up with had enough problems that he didn't wish to use it for his production site. He hired me to create something better, and that would function well regardless of screen resolution, user font size, or browser used to view it.

The logo I had to work with suggested the approach I take. I kept the lines clean and simple, and the colors the same subdued desaturated tones as are within the logo. Rather than use blocks of color to separate areas, I instead suggested the boundaries by the use of whitespace and alignment, keeping things simple and sleek. This design works with even very large scaled text sizes with no layout breakage, and works in all late model browsers.

This site is static html with a php include for the navigation block, to make editing easier.

I was given a very short set of instructions with LinuxNJ.com-- Make it Simple, Professional, and Cross Browser Compatible even at large default text sizes. Faber Fedor, the owner, uses a large text size in his browser and was appalled at the lack of free WordPress themes that would accomodate him. All of them that he tried would break the layout horribly when installed on his site with his large default text size. The new LinuxNJ.com Custom WordPress Theme accomplishes what most amateur created free themes fail at abominably.

Of course I found the idea of working with Penguins irresistible. The great photo I found from ngould at the Stock Exchange site adds just that little bit of whimsy that keeps this from being just another dry business site, and also reflects the slightly evangelical attitude toward Linux of the site owner, an attitude he freely admits to. I used that photo as the color basis for the site. This photo also gets us away from using the fabulous, but overused, Linux Penguin, while still paying homage to the Iconic Critter.

Sahad came to me with his idea of a sleek new design for his Venture Capital blog. The result has been launched on the vccircle.com website. Clean blue gradients and a simple and crisp new logo were designed for this. Since the site already enjoyed a good traffic flow, Sahad wished to make best use of adspace. This widget enabled custom wordpress theme allows him to place advertising wherever he wishes it, and use channels to track which ads are producing the clicks.

Three widget areas were used. One tops the two righthand columns, and the other two are contained in those lower right columns. This gives Sahad maximum control over his sidebar content.

The three column design is flexible in width with fixed side columns to allow for fixed width ad placement.

Bill Simon needed a site that combined the best features of a static brochure website with a blog to present his marketing ideas. We chose to use Wordpress as a simple Content Management System (CMS) and implemented a custom template for the homepage that would have "static" content up top but pull the latest blog entires into the lower area of the page.

The Custom WordPress Theme is widgetized so that Bill has complete control over the placement of navigation blocks and adspace in his sidebar areas.