I’ve just completed a redesign of the website for Robert Hartshorne, the composer who trades as ECG (Ex Cantibus Gaudium). Up until recently he’s the man who made all of the music for Thomas the Tank Engine, or Thomas and Friends as it’s now called. I first made a website for Robert back in 2000 and that was redesigned in 2007, so this is the third iteration. The new website is built in WordPress and uses video clips hosted with Vimeo and audio via SoundCloud. It’s so nice not to have to build custom audio players in Flash as I had to back in the old days.

LinkedIn has just reminded me that it’s 18 years since I’ve been working as a freelance website designer. And that reminded me that it’s 20 years since I made my first website – for the audio visual production company that I had at that time with my business partner Darryl Johnson. I can remember having loads of fun getting my head around table layouts and frames and probably loads of other things that would be anathema to web standards today. The first browser I used would have been Mosaic, but Netscape came along in 1994 and that’s the one I was using when I made the website in 1995. It’s quite amazing how far the web has come in just those few years.

And to wind up a few very busy weeks, a complete redesign of Performance & Wellbeing‘s website has just ‘gone live’.

PaW commissioned illustrator James Oses to produce a set of drawings for the site. These give a light touch and are a welcome relief from the more typical stock library photos that are all too common on small business websites.

I’ve just completed a redesign for The Alliance’s website. The new site has been made using WordPress and is based on the Smart theme by ThinkUp. It’s been heavily customised using a child theme and some extra bits in the functions.php file. The site is fully responsive and has been tested on various screen sizes, platforms and devices. It’s been a very nice project to work on.

I’ve had two new websites ‘go live’ this week. One for Weaverbird, “an international independent executive search consultancy with an exclusive focus on finding talented digital and technology leaders”. And the other for Lisa Carter, a chartered clinical psychologist. Neither site is my design – I’ve worked with two different design agencies on these projects.

The Weaverbird site uses HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery, while the Lisa Carter site is based on WordPress and uses a child theme based on picochic. The theme is responsive, but it took quite a lot of tweaking to get all the responsive levels looking good with the new design.

ReedDesign has just finished a complete redesign of the website of award winning composer Robert Hartshorne who goes under the scholarly business sobriquet of ECG – Ex Cantibus Gaudium – Enjoyment Through Melody. The site includes 60 audio and nearly 100 video clips that show off Robert’s great musical talent, including sections on Thomas and Friends and Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain.

I thought I’d add a panorama of the ReedDesign office so you can all see where all that creativity happens.

My laptop still has that abomination Vista installed as the postal strike seems to have held up the delivery of the Windows 7 upgrade, which I can’t wait to get my hands on.

The kite on the wall is a carp which I’ve been told in Chinese sounds like profit so hopefully it will give me good luck in business.

I’ve taken the opportunity of a couple of quiet days to update some of the older panoramas on my website. I’ve used the latest beta version of Pano2VR and decided to only go with Flash panoramas and ditch the Java and Quicktime versions completely. All of the updates used a much higher resolution image and will only be compatible with Flash 9 and upwards – but as the uptake of Flash 9 and now version 10 seems to be fairly universal I don’t think this will be much of a problem.

ReedDesign has just completed a series of 360° panoramas for Mill Hill and Belmont Schools. The panoramas include interiors of the Chapel, Favell Building and 6th Form Common Room as well as some exterior views of the grounds.

The panoramas were shot on a Nikon D300 with a 10.5mm fisheye lens and a KingPano panoramic head. They were stitched using PTGui and converted into Flash panoramas using Pano2VR.

The latest ReedDesign website went live today. It’s a total re-design for the Socialist International Women – nearly 300 pages in three languages.

Socialist International Women is the international organisation of the women’s organisations of the socialist, social democratic and labour parties affiliated to the Socialist International.