Website Development and Graphical Designs

Sea Green Canteen is a new start-up company situated at Northcott Mouth near Bude, Cornwall. Sea Green Canteen offers a seafood barbecue every Friday until the end of September.

I was asked to produce a logo which met the following requirements: uncomplicated design, giving the impression of seafood venture, serving healthy foods such as vegetables, salads  and of course barbecue foods. With this in mind, I immediately decided on a top down view of the barbecue with a fish cut in half, revealing the name of the start-up company.

Trev from TrevsTaxi approached me to develop a mini website for BigUpBude. The idea was to have a website where anything posted with the hashtab #BigUpBude on Twitter and Facebook is posted onto the website, in realtime.

To do this, the website communicates with Facebook’s API as well as Twitter’s API to retrieve the latest posts or tweets with the hashtag #BigUpBude. The code then sorts the posts based on when it was last posted and then displays it in a timeline on the website. All of which is live from Facebook and Twitter.

To make the website design attractive, it was decided that an animated banner at the top of the website would be designed to give the website that little edge over other websites aiming to do the same thing.

As a freelance developer in Cornwall, it was a fun project to be apart of. As it allowed me to drive into Facebook’s and Twitter’s APi. If you require bespoke development (such as bespoke software development), then feel free to get in touch via my contact form to discuss your requirements.

The plan was to update the Beach House website to get away from the simplistic (black and white boring) sort of websites to a more funky, wacky bold in your face type of website.

The original WordPress site was pretty tired. The homepage had a dated design that had a series of small titles, each of which had a small image attached, despite the beautiful images being a selling point of the company. The site was mostly text based which made it feel cluttered and difficult to direct the user through the site.

Upon visiting Beth at the Beach House it soon became clear that the general feel/vibe and style of the company was of a relaxed, chilled environment and not that of your typical hotel but perhaps fitting of one overlooking a beach. A colourful, vibrant, rustic and laid beach venue, a global travellers paradise is the style they are trying to achieve at the beach house.  I suggested using rustic textures throughout combined with wonky text, with sea sprays on graphics and fonts to accommodate the hotel’s theme  As Beth had some really beautiful eye catching imagery, I also suggested using big sprays with fat fonts overlays on top of the imagery, inviting people into the website.

I absolutely loved working on this website design, tooooooo much fun!

For your funky website design needs, get in touch by navigating to the contact page here.

Bude’s End Destination is the resident nightclub of Bude, Cornwall. Recently re modernised BED now accommodates a larger capacity, a imposing centralised  bar, spacious dance floor and comfortable lounge seating area.

Jo from BED, Bude (Bude’s End Destination) came to me with a website that was out-of-date and in desperate need of a revamp. The brief for the site was simple; it should shout fun, live music and lots of dancing whilst still allowing Jo to upload new events to the website. The logo would stay relatively the same, but everything else would be changed and modernised.

Speaking to Jo to start the ball rolling with design ideas, it was clear that after seeing Leopallooza website she was giving me free rein with designing the new website. Using some of the techniques I used on Leopallooza allowed me to to give life to the website by animating stage lights from left and right to simulate lights within the nightclub.

Jo was delighted with the results and couldn’t wait to start showing it off. And I can’t express how much fun this site was to put together! Anything with animation, always gets peoples attentions and makes it fun to develop.

Beth from the Beach House in Widemouth contacted me to produce some menu designs for her new beach bar called The Break; for beach, tunes & ocean views overlooking Widemouth Beach.

Using the theme of this laid back, informal and chilled beach venue that epitomises North coast beach life, I set about designing the menu. I decided upon quirky design with bits cut off and no straight lines or boxes, in order to portray relaxation and that feeling of comfort, combined with musical instruments as icons.

June from Stable Door Pets in Bude approached me to look at their current website and make suggestions on how to make it more interesting and engaging for potential new customers and their existing clients. Upon looking at the website, it was clear that a re-design and product photoshot would be of benefit. The reasons for drawing this conclusion were that the previous Stable Door Pets website was not displaying the type of products they have in-store and the user interface (UX) was lacking the functionality and interactivity that people typically expect from websites nowadays.

During the meeting we discussed the possibilities of integrating animations into the website. However, as we wanted the pictures from the photoshot to be the focus point, we agreed to develop a footer animation showing livestock animals running around in a field. Footers are known for being boring so by using an animation would bring the site life in an unobtrusive manner. As June had requested for the website to work on all devices including mobiles, the animation was created using CSS3 ensuring that the animation will run across all devices.

Upon looking around in the store it soon became obvious that the designs on many of the products were friendly and fun. My visit prompted a review of the current logo and a discussion of how it can be brought up to date along with the website. I decided to keep the red for the site to reflect the well-recognised bright red store-front in Bude – I love consistent branding!

As with every new website, I make sure the website is responsive. Google penalises any site that is now not mobile-friendly so it is crucial to get your site responsive so all your other hard work doesn’t go to waste!

For all your Bude website design needs, contact me by going to the contact form where we can discuss anything from a website refresh to a new project.

I have been working with The Kitchen Front for several years now which meant it was an obvious choice for Clair to use myself for a website refresh.

One of the criticisms of the previous website, was that Clair wasn’t able to update it easily with new events, resulting in customers being unable to keep up to date with her latest events and workshops. We both decided that it was time to change the backend content management system to WordPress; thus allowing Clair to easily update the new website’s products and manage its content.

Whilst updating the backend of the system, a complete overall of the design was also agreed. However, while refreshing a website’s design is usually relatively easy, this particular style proved to be challenging. Clair had a certain theme in her head which I had to replicate.  I had to keep thinking – old fashioned, sewing, tea parties, fairy cakes and above all girly. After several tweaks, we achieved the design, exactly as requested.

As you can see from this project, whatever the design requests, I aim to please the client even if it requires several iterations. Click here to get in touch and discuss your requirements.

I was approached by All-Clear Pest Control with a brief to strengthen their current branding and develop a new website using the newly devised colour scheme and branding.

After a bit of mind mapping with the guys at All-Clear Pest Control, it was decided that a clean brand design needed to be created, this ensures that the company is following current design trends as well as making it easy for all demographics to understand and use the new site. Following the development of the new branding, designing the website concept was relatively easy. This resulted in a number of simple insect silhouettes being used as buttons for navigating the website. These silhouettes were then used as icons for headers throughout the website which made each page consistent. An animated icon was also developed, but it was abandoned because it was far too distracting on the eyes – despite being really fun to make :)

Whether you’re looking for a clean website design or a textured/designed website, I am available to discuss your requirements. To get in touch, click here to contact me.

Scott from Bude Surfing Experience was looking for some flyers and leaflets to be designed promoting – Standup Paddle boarding in the Bude, Cornwall area.

Following the style of the recently completed advert design, I started setting up the initial elements in 3D space such as the titles and pictures,followed by setting up the water particles to give the poster that feeling of water droplets.

The final part of this project was to position the lighting rig in the most appropriate places, in order to give the poster that realistic feeling of flowing water.

Mark from Cornwall Carriages was looking to revamp his website.  The brief included a request for the integration of a booking system for his carriage tours around Cornwall. While there are several off-the-shelf booking systems available, they were deemed overly complicated and therefore a bespoke solution was created.  This solution would also mean that the booking experience could be optimised to its full potential.

Upon looking at the current website, we discussed that the colour scheme needed a refresh, in order to make the website more vibrant and promote the feel of  a luxury experience. The end result is a combination of the existing colours with a vibrant ascent colour to help lift some of the important features, thus catching customer’s attention.

To further promote the custom bespoke booking system, it was decided that an animated banner would be beneficial in catching people’s attention. The end result included an animated horse and carriage running up and down with various marketing text sliding in and out of the banner.