Posts Tagged ‘portfolio’

St Paul’s School Intranet

4pm, Friday November 6th, 20094 CommentsTags: , , , , ,

St Paul’s School updated the installation of their Content Management System, Firefly.NET, . Along with this update they included a new template that I built, changing the layout of the Intranet which had been there since, I believe, 2001. Here’s a few screenshots to compare the two:

Homepage Comparison
CompSoc Comparison
ICT Department

This redesign made use of Firefly.NET’s template architecture, so the template files were built with XSLT and various stylesheets. While the old template was built using tables (back in 2001, I imagine this was fairly common), the update changes to use <div>s and more common stylesheet positioning instead. It’s technically HTML5, in that the first line of every document is <!doctype html>, though this doesn’t really mean anything for the time being. My favourite part of the redesign? The name of the school now has a proper apostrophe (St Paul’s vs. St Paul's). Apparently I can be a little picky.

Firefly.NET is the system St Paul’s has been using to manage content on its website and Intranet for quite a while now. It was developed by two former pupils of the school, Joe Mathewson and Simon Hay. You can read more about their work and their clients on the Firefly Solutions site.

Bedouin Foundry

7pm, Wednesday September 16th, 20092 CommentsTags: , , , ,

Bedouin Foundry Main Page

I’ve spent the last couple of months working on a site for a new company, Bedouin® – it was great experience, and really good fun. The site isn’t particularly extensive, so it’s based on flat files rather than any kind of content management system or database; though as it grows, that’s definitely something to consider. The artwork was done by Zeke Wade, the design and layout by Silas Grant, and the coding (PHP, HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript) by me. The site works in IE6 with surprisingly little work – my favourite part is it serves a not-as-pretty GIF background if you’re using Internet Explorer 6 or older instead of any other browser. And as any web developer knows, if it works in IE6 it’ll work in just about anything else. Except IE5.

Feel free to check out the live site now, and make sure to admire the beautiful illustrations: Bedouin®.



Bedouin Foundry Development

“600 Happy Users”

10am, Thursday July 9th, 2009CommentTags: , , , , ,

Last night, my redesign of the internal Maths department VLE at the University of York went live. When I started at the department in October last year, it looked a little like this:

Moodle: Old Home

Click the image to view it in all its glory. I'm not going to draw your attention to some of the things I've come to love most about it, because frankly it speaks for itself.

As you might expect, looking at that got boring and started to hurt my eyes pretty quickly. In May, I went to see Henning Bostelmann, the guy who looks after all things Maths & website there, and offered to try my hand at creating something. This is what's happened over the last couple of months:

Moodle: New Home

Leaving Henning's office last week, he remarked how there would now be “600 happy users” in the department – thank you, Henning, for your help testing, fixing, testing, updating, and more testing.

I love university; there's so much freedom to do anything and everything to improve departments, societies, colleges, the list goes on. I hope I don't sound too much like a naïve little first year, but I really do think it's the case – here's something which will (hopefully) outlast the time I spend at York, and that means something to me.

The boring interesting stuff: it's a fairly hacky CSS job (so no judging my [lack of] coding skills from here, please), using the gorgeous Silk icons from famfamfam – so many thanks to Mark James for providing his icons free of charge, they're such a great resource. Moodle, the open-source (!!, ♥) learning environment that we're using, is actually impressively easy to mess about with. This seems to be one of those “20% of pages used 80% of the time” situations, so it's nowhere near finished and there's always room for improvement; might do the same thing again next year to just tidy it up.

What follows are a few parts that I'm really happy with…

Moodle: Old LoginMoodle: New Login
Moodle: Old Course PageMoodle: New Course Page
Moodle: Old User PageMoodle: New User Page