Few peo­ple know the nec­es­sary steps involved in web­de­sign and web­de­vel­op­ment. If you work in the IT indus­try peo­ple ask you to fix their com­puter. If you’re an illus­tra­tor, peo­ple ask you to make draw­ings for them… for free or close to noth­ing. If you make web­sites, peo­ple ask you to make web­sites for them. There’s this expec­ta­tion that web­de­sign– and devel­op­ment is some easy entry level step-up to the real deal of soft­ware devel­op­ment. It’s not. Just because there are now excel­lent free tools like Word­Press or Joomla!, my two pre­ferred cms plat­forms, to make web­sites, doesn’t mean every­body has the skills to make qual­ity ones.

Web­de­sign ver­sus webdevelopment

I’m a web­de­signer, not a web­de­vel­oper. There’s only so much I want to learn and PHP,  web­ser­vices and data­bases is where I draw the line. Is not so much that I wouldn’t be have the abil­ity to learn it and maybe I will in the future, but it is too far removed from design­ing. Besides that I found out on numer­ous occas­sions that cod­ing just isn’t my thing. One of the rea­sons I pre­fer Jquery over Javascript.

Projects 2011

nexusstudios.nl

No pro­fes­sional web­de­signer can go with­out his/her own web­site. The same went for the busi­ness I’d set up. A week­end of hard work laid the foun­da­tion for our own cor­po­rate web­site: nexusstudios.nl.

goudengoud.nl

Based on the same tem­plate build for the web­site in the next para­graph, kadastralegegevens.nl, the gouden­goud web­site got a com­pletely dif­fer­ent look and feel to it. The same respon­si­bil­i­ties of design and CMS setup were to be my part.

kadastralegegevens.nl

A web­site made for the sole pur­pose of deliv­er­ing house related info prod­uct to con­sumers. Another word­press based web­site where I took respon­is­bil­ity for design, CSS, HTML and Word­Press setup.

prijsvaneenhuis.nl

I did a design and par­tial migra­tion to the Word­Press plat­form for my own Prijs van een Huis web­site. If fully proved to be the right step to do, enhanc­ing the func­tion­al­ity of the whole site tremen­dously. Word­Press was nec­es­sary to be able to lift the web­site to the sta­tus of social media platform.

Sportlink Club Website

To com­ple­ment the new Sportlink Cor­po­rate web­site I also did a com­plete over­haul of the Sportlink Club web­site, one of their prod­ucts. Work involved was it’s own dis­tinc­tive iden­tity and design incor­po­rated in another Joomla site with three sep­a­rate templates.

Sportlink Ser­vices Cor­po­rate Website

The cor­po­rate web­site of Sportlink Ser­vices. Designed the com­plete cor­po­rate iden­tity in Illus­tra­tor. Fol­lowed up with sta­tic HTML pages and CSS in Dreamweaver. Build the cus­tom Joomla! Tem­plate file and the over­all site structure.

Johan­van­sei­jen V4

The johanvanseijen.com V4 is, as you might guess, the fourth install­ment of my per­sonal web­site. Where a friend of mine made the V1 in 2007 when to dis­play my illus­tra­tions, V2 to V4 exceeded each other in rapid suc­ces­sion cul­mi­nat­ing in the web­site I have today. Inspired by Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s dri­ven by the Word­Press CMS.

Soft­ware typ­i­cally used

Adobe Illus­tra­tor CS5: A great design is the foun­da­tion for a qual­ity web­site just as it is for and other piece of soft­ware. It has its pros and cons when com­pared to it’s coun­ter­part Pho­to­shop. Both are great. I hap­pened to already know Illus­tra­tor when start­ing the web­de­sign busi­ness and stuck with it.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5: You can pretty much do any­thing with this pro­gram with respect to build­ing web­site front-ends. Because I mainly make con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems I use Dreamweaver as a code edi­tor on steroids.

Joomla!: There are a num­ber of great open source con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems (CMS) and Joomla! is one of them. A CMS builds every page for you based on the con­tent you sup­ply in the back­end. It is the next step from sta­tic web­pages where you have to make every indi­vid­ual page by hand so to speak. It’s fairly easy to learn and the basic func­tion­al­ity is more flex­i­ble than Word­Press, the other big open source CMS on the market.

Word­Press: Word­Press is still very much a blog CMS and should be used when the need for this func­tion­al­ity is there. My own site is build with this plat­form and I find it very hard to exactly dis­tin­guish the areas where Word­Press trumps Joomla! and vice versa. What I do know is that I had con­sid­er­able more prob­lems build­ing my own site than I had build­ing Joomla! sites which has every­thing to do with the mod­u­lar­ity of the tem­plate. Now I’m just glad to know both so I can choose when I want to.