Web Design

Below you'll find a list of some of the web sites that I've created recently. If you like what you see, and you need your own web site, contact me by e-mail :

Prices vary, depending on how large the site is, and how complex it is. A typical site costs £1,000.

You will also have to pay a "web hosting" company to host your site. This is very cheap, it can be as little as £2 per month + VAT.

Nick.

Havering Hypnotherapy

My latest web site, is for haveringhypnotherapy.co.uk.

I'm currently very happy with this site. I think it looks professional, and the technology behind the scenes is very interesting too. Fiona has access to a editable version of this site. This lets her tinker with the content, without having to know anything about html etc. At the press of a button, the changes are moved to the live site.

There is a duplicate site here.

Cityhypnosis

I have a friend who is a hypnotherapist, and he had an appallingly bad web site, so I volunteered to fix it. I'm a java programmer, and I know how to create solid, standards compliant, usable web sites (in my day job I create secure web sites for one of the world's largest investment banks). I kept the graphical design simple, black and white, with a splash of yin-yang logo thrown in.

The final web site is static xhtml, which means it can be hosted on any (cheap) web server, with little moving parts, and so its very unlikely to go wrong.

However, the source for the site (on my local machine) are jsp pages. I use apache's struts and a few other jsp custom tags to separate the content from the presentation. I can make a single change to the presentation, and all pages are changed. I have a simple script which coverts the dynamic (jsp) site into static html files, and uploads them using ftp. This works a treat, all the power and flexibility of jsp, and all the simplicity and reliability of static html. The script even validates the html on the fly, so all of my pages should be xhtml compliant.

The March Hares

Next up was the hypnotist's brother, and his band The March Hares. A great band, with great songs, its a real pity they disbanded.

This web site was more tricky, a band needs to convey a sense of style. Graphical design is important. Its fun to learn (another motto), so I dived straight in, cutting up images, mixing black and white and creating that sepia look of the past, and mixing it with bold colours of the new. The site was a failure, it never went live. I was told that the other band members didn't want to "lose control" of their web site. I never understood this though, as I was giving them the html to replace their amateurish efforts, they could do whatever they wanted with it - change it as they saw fit. Oh well, it was fun doing it.

Eastbound Platform

The word got around, "Nick's knocking up web sites". My brother Mike wanted one, he had a band too: Eastbound Platform. They are a tongue-in-cheek covers band. They don't do much in the way of gigging, once a year if that. I figured this web site wasn't going to be heavily used, so I didn't put that much effort into it. My prediction held true. I also realised that I didn't want to continually update the content of these web sites. So instead of using static xhtml, I chose to make this one a wiki. This lets Mike and his fellow band mates edit the site themselves. I like to give people the power to help themselves. "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll be happy while starving to death". :-)

Nick The Coder .co .uk

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Around this time, I created a proper web site for myself, hosted at my Mum's house (thanks Mum:-). Alas, much of the site is blocked from the general public (such as my music web site - I don't want to aid piracy).

France Yoga Retreat

An ex-collegue of mine (my first boss in fact), moved out of the IT business in London for the rural life in western France. She has a beautiful house, where she occasionally hosts yoga holidays. If you are into yoga, treat yourself to a holiday there, you won't regret it!

This site was pretty straight forward, I borrowed the technology, and much of the layout from the cityhypnosis web site, added a few images of the surrounding district, and bob's your uncle.

IMHO, the problem with this kind of site, is the amount of money you have to pay in advertising (the reason google is so rich!), compared to the number of customers you can accommodate.

Options Singles

I'm not overly happy with this web site, but I'll include it for completeness. Its for a non-profit singles club in the Havering area. The web site is maintained by my Dad. He uses a simple HTML editor, with in built ftp. Later, I added a wiki section too, where any Options Singles member can contribute to the site.

Umbrella Wiki

I am often asked "How easy is to create a web site about xyz". Many of these requests could easily be met by a simple wiki. I don't want to maintain lots of wikis, so I came up with the idea of an umbrella wiki. A single wiki instance, which is capable of holding many unrelated sub-wikis. Each sub-wiki can have its own layout, and colour scheme.

Since I created this, Nobody has asked me to set up a wiki for them. That's sod's law for you!

Stick Flick

I've written a simple animation program, designed for fun, rather than for serious animations. Some day, I may get around to advertising it to the world, but right now, not many people know about it. I created this web site as a vehicle to spread the word of Stick Flick, and then later to become the basis of a community for Stick Flick users.

Recommended

Wiki Structure