louiscox.com
Dorset Freelance Website Design and Development
Development :
I have now adopted Kohana to create industrial grade PHP / MySQL database backed dynamic websites. It's MVC architecture ensures that software/functionality is reusable ( OOP ) and can be passed between many sites or parts of sites so development is efficient and quick.
Conceivably the framework is limited only by the imagination, but my most recent interest has been using API such as GoogleMaps, Flickr and FriendFeed, demonstrated on this site in the homepage, examples and social feed, to retrieve live information from these sites.
This is all shored-up with years of experience working with the nuts and bolts of the web; ground floor HTML and its variants, CSS, XML and Javascript as well as being able to test in a wide variety of browsers and plug-ins.
Actionscript has been a basis for much of my work, both animation and application building and I've been using Flash and laterly Flex to build my work in it.
I have now adopted Kohana to create industrial grade PHP / MySQL database backed dynamic websites. It's MVC architecture ensures that software/functionality is reusable ( OOP ) and can be passed between many sites or parts of sites so development is efficient and quick.
Conceivably the framework is limited only by the imagination, but my most recent interest has been using API such as GoogleMaps, Flickr and FriendFeed, demonstrated on this site in the homepage, examples and social feed, to retrieve live information from these sites.
This is all shored-up with years of experience working with the nuts and bolts of the web; ground floor HTML and its variants, CSS, XML and Javascript as well as being able to test in a wide variety of browsers and plug-ins.
Actionscript has been a basis for much of my work, both animation and application building and I've been using Flash and laterly Flex to build my work in it.
Costs :
Generally the cost of hiring me for a few days is a lot cheaper than trying to do things yourself or using a readymade solution if you require something custom, which is what I'm about really. In some cases clients are far better served with a solid design and simple, reliable functionality rather than a bells and whistles website. How often do you really need to update that content? Do you really have the time / inclination to do it? If its not every week you will be paying a lot of money for unused functionality.
Doing things yourself might seem an initially cheaper option. When you actually work out the time that you have spent dealing with errors, correcting display and so on, when you could have been doing the day job, will it actually work out cheaper?
Buying an off the shelf product - its perfect for some people. If your thinking about a business site and don't really know WordPress, Drupal or Joomla very well then in all likelihood this is going to work out a very expensive exercise in learning how to operate a very complex bit of software thats probably not customisable in the way you wanted.
Generally web design and development is a service and it has much in common with many other businesses. There is an old saying that goes - 'we have three kinds of service, quality, cheap and fast. You can realistically ask for two'. Quality product, cheap wont be very fast, Quality product, fast, wont come cheap and fast service cheap wont be good. Although its only a saying, making websites is a matter of trading one thing against another when it comes to quality, speed and cost.
Generally the cost of hiring me for a few days is a lot cheaper than trying to do things yourself or using a readymade solution if you require something custom, which is what I'm about really. In some cases clients are far better served with a solid design and simple, reliable functionality rather than a bells and whistles website. How often do you really need to update that content? Do you really have the time / inclination to do it? If its not every week you will be paying a lot of money for unused functionality.
Doing things yourself might seem an initially cheaper option. When you actually work out the time that you have spent dealing with errors, correcting display and so on, when you could have been doing the day job, will it actually work out cheaper?
Buying an off the shelf product - its perfect for some people. If your thinking about a business site and don't really know WordPress, Drupal or Joomla very well then in all likelihood this is going to work out a very expensive exercise in learning how to operate a very complex bit of software thats probably not customisable in the way you wanted.
Generally web design and development is a service and it has much in common with many other businesses. There is an old saying that goes - 'we have three kinds of service, quality, cheap and fast. You can realistically ask for two'. Quality product, cheap wont be very fast, Quality product, fast, wont come cheap and fast service cheap wont be good. Although its only a saying, making websites is a matter of trading one thing against another when it comes to quality, speed and cost.
WordPress Theme customisation :
Added to this I have also started using WordPress in conjunction with Kohana to control the WordPress Theme, in effect making a custom design for the theme as seen in my blog. This forms a superposition of the both, Kohana for raw computing horsepower and WordPress for content flexibility.
Added to this I have also started using WordPress in conjunction with Kohana to control the WordPress Theme, in effect making a custom design for the theme as seen in my blog. This forms a superposition of the both, Kohana for raw computing horsepower and WordPress for content flexibility.
Design :
My background is design, Im a design graduate. I'm a great believer that what I make has many parallels with architecture and as such many of it's maxims follow for web design, less is more, form follows function.
That said however, I do have the experience of having worked on a wide variety of web and multimedia projects for over ten years now.
There are certain packages I use to create the graphics, multimedia and animations. Im quite happy to use a pen / pencil and paper as much as a computer, but generally all bitmap graphics are made with Photoshop and any SVGs are made with Illustrator.
My background is design, Im a design graduate. I'm a great believer that what I make has many parallels with architecture and as such many of it's maxims follow for web design, less is more, form follows function.
That said however, I do have the experience of having worked on a wide variety of web and multimedia projects for over ten years now.
There are certain packages I use to create the graphics, multimedia and animations. Im quite happy to use a pen / pencil and paper as much as a computer, but generally all bitmap graphics are made with Photoshop and any SVGs are made with Illustrator.
Multimedia :
The combined advent of accessible Broadband, increasingly powerful computers with up-to-date browsers like FireFox, large scale streaming sites like YouTube and lots of new standards like Web 2.0 or CSS3 has effectively resurrected a need for multimedia on the web. Many of my clients have now expressed a need for both HTML based / Flash based sites rich with video, animation and functionality.
Any animation work, be it traditional cellframe,shape or actionscript is done with Flash ( Usually - see development ). Video animation is done with After effects. Any video needed for multimedia is done with Apple's Final cut.
The combined advent of accessible Broadband, increasingly powerful computers with up-to-date browsers like FireFox, large scale streaming sites like YouTube and lots of new standards like Web 2.0 or CSS3 has effectively resurrected a need for multimedia on the web. Many of my clients have now expressed a need for both HTML based / Flash based sites rich with video, animation and functionality.
Any animation work, be it traditional cellframe,shape or actionscript is done with Flash ( Usually - see development ). Video animation is done with After effects. Any video needed for multimedia is done with Apple's Final cut.