I just finished up a site I was working on for a friend. It was actually finished a while ago, but I’ve only just uploaded it to the server for public view. I think it is one of the better looking site designs I’ve had the honor to put together. I was given total artistic license to be creative and present her old site in a new, revitalized way. I chose some very drastic changes from her previous design, but the customer was pleased with them. My wife, of Celestial Studios, provided all the photography. The new photos really added a lot to the overall professionalism and aesthetics.
The one thing I didn’t do was create a site that would work on every browser. Unfortunately, this one was designed to work on IE 7 and Firefox 2+. I doubt you’ll get much love from previous versions of IE, though Firefox may not choke too much. At any rate, I don’t know that I’m going to spend a lot of time on making it compatible with other browses at the risk of losing functionality. I do have some minor kinks to work out, but I don’t think the average user will even notice them.
Have a look and let me know what you think – good or bad.
The design looks great. I really love the tree that is the center piece as well as the Celtic knot corners. I had even seen this a few times while you were working on it and I still think it is a refreshing look.
Nice job.
As for the technical bit. I am using firefox 2 and it works great. If you do decide to work on it more I would change the images from loading on a seperate and blank page to a javascript pop-out – something like “thunbnail view” from here – http://www.longren.org/wordpress/thumbnail-viewer/
Regardless it looks great.
— Isi
The thumbnail viewer is a good idea as a plugin-in. I had originally designed the site to show images without formatting because the job was a single-page layout. I could have put in some fancy DHTML coding to get the image to show up in a mouseOver or onClick event on the same page, but that would have exceeded the customer’s budget for this first phase of the project. On the other hand, if I used someone else’s previously developed image management module, it may fall within a “can do” attitude.