Let me first start by saying, I am not a designer by trade, but I do enjoy reading about it and trying to understand it better. In general I know what looks good. Getting my own work to look good is the tougher part. I have 3 rules I follow to get the job done and it’s something I learned from a designer friend of mine.

It’s referred to the 3 C’s of design: Consistency, Conservation (Clutter-busting) and Contrast

The one I use the most every day is “consistency”. You can face design pretty darn well by just making sure your layout is consistent.

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OK, so I’m in the process of recoding the Win This! website. This time around I did everything on the site, The design, the HTML/CSS/JavaScript and I’m now busy doing the PHP integration from the back-end I built for the initial launch.

So here are some teaser images for what you can expect from the new site:

Check back soon to see the final product.

It was a few months ago that me and my buddy Clement came up with the idea of building a site that could list all the local online competitions. He was going to do the design and I was going to do the coding.

Initially I thought that I was going to build the whole thing on WordPress, but after some consideration we decided to build a custom system that would cater specifically to our needs. Lucky for me I had a basic skeleton already (which I customized for ScientificFeed) and the building started.

This is now a fully operational back-end that allows us to upload pictures for the various competitions and also to specify if a competition should be featured at the top of the site or not. It also have a fully integrated mailing list sign up system and messaging system.

In addition to all that I also coded it to export a RSS feed for the site to allow people to follow the site from a reader of their choice.

Check out the WinThis site!

ScientificFeed.com is some sort of a landmark project for me. Its the 1st time that I did a whole site start to end where PHP was involved. (I’m currently still learning PHP and this was my 1st learning project) I came up with the idea, then designed the site, then coded the front-end (HTML/CSS/JS) and then coded all of the PHP for it.

The idea was simple. I would build a widget that people can put it on their site or blog and reach their visitors with fresh facts on every visit… while educating them in a fun way about science.

The facts are split into 6 categories (animals, plants, technology, space, medical and the human body). This is to make sure that you don’t force your visitors to read about tape worms on you astronomy site. The single view of a fact will also show you 3 related facts from the same category, for further browsing.

The site is sporting a custom back end that allows me to add/remove facts, track widget usage and check messages that was sent from the site’s contact form.

Check out the ScientificFeed site! (and maybe sign up for a widget too!)

The new Lola’s closet website went live last week.. and this one is a goodie!

The tech that was used in the production is as follows, my homey Deon built the back end in PHP using the Zend framework, and I built the front end using HTML, CSS and JavaScript (using the jQuery framework to be exact). The flash bits was done by my other homey Harold.

The design was done by Lisa and Jade.. I love seeing nice designs like this come alive with JavaScript and Flash.. It makes me appreciate my job!

Check out the site!