Website Stuff

I wanted to be a professional website designer a long long time ago. I even went as far as to register a company name, attend a business course and set up Cyberfire as a web presence to advertise my creative services. I designed everything - built the website from scratch in Dreamweaver, created all the graphics, images, logos, stationary - the lot. Spent many hours studying how to create rounded corners, what navigation systems work best with consumers, colour schemes that attract. The only thing missing was customers. Why? Because I didn't advertise my existence. Why? Lack of confidence, no more no less.

So what did I do? I went back into care work from whence I came and left Cyberfire hidden in the ever expanding web-world like a digital gravestone of what could have been. Web design continued as a personal hobby. But from the ashes of Cyberfire I did get a couple of customers who offered good money for a website which in turn drove me to create some pretty decent and original sites for their time.

The first of these customers was Jack Grassby who I persuaded needed a web presence to promote his books (that I had designed and typeset). The second was his publisher TUPS Books (an even bigger challenge). Other websites I've done include friends and family as well as for myself.

Contained on this page are links to all of the live sites I've done or screen shots of previous versions to show how the design progressed. Some are okay, others not. Things are so much easier now, especially using Rapidweaver as a base on which to create my sites such as this one and Hauntedland, my other project.

The 1984 Online project was my introduction to website design. Being asked to contribute originally as a writer led me to want to present my articles in a way I preferred. This in turn compelled me to want to create the whole image of the site. On this page are examples of what I produced. They haven't aged well sadly.