Website design portfolio
Here are some examples of websites we have designed and built.
Black Cat PC
http://www.blackcatpc.co.uk
Black Cat PC has been trading for over 10 years selling everything to do with computers, from CPU fans through to bespoke systems. They specialise in custom high-end systems for gamers and power-users.
The owner of Black Cat PC came to us after having paid another company an awful lot of money to design a website which looked terrible and didn't even work properly! He didn’t want to spend a lot more money, but he asked us to design him a simple website and a new logo. We also had to redesign the theme for his existing online shop, and make the shop run properly. Besides running their own shop Black Cat PC also trade on eBay, and their eBay store had to be redesigned to match the rest of the site.
Caesar’s Grunt designed all the cartoons and other artwork for this site. In fact, the only thing we took from the old site was the text!
Jill Dickin Schinas
http://www.jilldickinschinas.com
Jill Dickin Schinas is an artist, writer and photographer who wanted a tri-part website to display her wares. One section of the site is devoted to her books, another is a ‘virtual’ gallery of her paintings, and the third is a photo library containing thousands of digital images.
Clearly a site of this kind involves a huge and complex database. Since it requires constant updating it also needs to incorporate a content management system - the owner does not want to employ the services of a designer every time she needs to add text, paintings, or new photos!
Various systems are available to allow the layman to control the content of his own site, but none was sufficiently sophisticated for this use. Caesar’s Grunt therefore designed and custom-built a content management system which allows the site owner to do everything her heart desires. She can upload images, selecting an appropriate category or subcategory or even choosing to place the image in a number of different categories; she can add text and format it; she can create internal links enbling visitors to move easily from one image to another related one, and she can create external links to other websites - all without knowing the first thing about programming. All she has to be able to do is remember her passsword and so gain access to the admin area of her site.
The site also includes a search box, so that visitors can hunt for a specific image, a contact form, and provision for an online shop to be added, if the artist so wishes, at a future date.
The design and construction of this complex content management system was the work of many weeks... but now that this hard labour has been done the system is avavilable to anyone requiring similar type of site at a very affordable rate.
Southbourne Sea Scouts
The Southbourne Sea Scout Group belongs to the great international fellowship of Scouts which was begun by Lord Baden Powell in 1907.
The principal purpose of the Southbourne Sea Scout website was to inform would-be members about club activities and advise existing ones of forthcoming events. Caesar’s Grunt had carte blanche to design this website as we saw fit. We took all the photographs, drew the cartoons, and wrote all of the text using sources supplied to us by the Scout group leaders.
Because the Scout leaders needed to be able to update this website themselves, filling in details of future events on their calendar and adding photos of past ones to their logbook, we provided an easy to operate administrative page. This enabled even someone who had no knowledge whatsoever of website construction or programming to ammend the site. Unfortunately, the Southbourne Sea Scout leaders seldom got round to doing this - and eventually they abandoned the site.
This particular website attracted much favourable comment, with one of our other customers describing it as “extremely good ... it’s one of the best sites I’ve seen. It’s easy to navigate, runs really smoothly, and the pictures really portray Scouting well.” He even said that it made him wish he was young enough to join!
Club Vela
This site is no longer online as the sailing school has closed down.
Once again the customer had no particular vision of his website; he just knew that he needed to be online. The company colours were yellow and blue, and so we used a sandy yellow for the background and blue for the text. Our artist would like to make it clear that she did not design the logo!
Caesar’s Grunt supplied most of the photos of sailing dinghies, and the client provided the other photos and all of the text.
This site had so many pages that we decided to use a pop-out menu system for the navigation. Pop-out menus differ from dropdowns in that they ‘pop out’ from the side rather than ‘dropping down’ from the top. There were just too many categories to fit the menus across the top of the page. Pop-outs are very difficult to build - which is why you don’t see them very often!
Yacht Mollymawk
http://www.yachtmollymawk.com
Yacht Mollymawk is effectively a weblog - but since the site owner dislikes this jargon word she calls it a logbook and scrapbook. The site was designed and built by Caesar’s Grunt and has been constructed in such a way that the crew of the good ship Mollymawk can add articles and photos without any assistance and without the need for them to know a single word of any programming language.
If you take a look at the site you may come across some familiar names.