Crikeymiles.com

I recently completed a refresh of the theming for London-based string quartet, the Finzi Quartet‘s site.

Finzi have been getting a fair amount of exposure and they wanted to ensure their site remained fresh and modern. We went for something that was a little lighter, a little more gentle, and a little crisper. I’m very pleased with the outcome, I hope they are too!

Brief styling job for my friend Ian, who is a freelance video editor. He is using a creative community CMS turnkey called Cargo Collective which is a pretty decent solution for non-techhead creative types (although I dislike their lack of markup in the output). Visually, Ian wanted something very clean and simple, which put the video screen at the centre and didn’t fuss about. Here ’tis:

Professional site for actor Kerry Gooderson. Built in Drupal with a theme based around a photo shoot we did in the dressing rooms of the Criterion theatre in London’s West End. The background image was built from the photo shoot images, and a film-frame by Struckdumb, which I found on DeviantArt.

I used pretty standard modules – CCK, Views, Login Destination, Lightbox2, Audio – although I wrote a (10 line) custom module to display a user guide node on an admin url, so that it could be viewed using the admin theme. I also didn’t use the Image module. Custom CCK content type for images + Views = much more flexible and powerful gallery.

I’m very pleased with how this site turned out. Nice tight design and a very tidy admin experience (I hope Kerry will agree!).

After the success with Rael’s website, he has essentially been acting as my agent; having got me the Finzi gig, and shortly after that a site for his friend and professional colleague Matt Robertson. [Thanks Rael!]

Matt Robertson is a composer/engineer type, working on film and commercial music projects. He wanted a smart but creative looking CV site to act as an online business card. It needed to be simple to update and look great, but not be particularly dynamic or rich – just text and images.

It was scratch built in PHP and HTML, and the background image is a detail from a painting entitled “Orange Strip” by my immensely talented grandfather Michael McLellan.

Recently completed another Drupal site, this time for London-based string quartet; the Finzi Quartet.

The requirement was for a neat public site, stylish but classy, which captured something of the girls’ personalities and was accessible to a slightly older visitor, in line with the audience for their music.

I chose to use Drupal as they required a quite full featured website which they could keep up to date themselves.

I had a lot of trouble with the Image Gallery module, (which I have to say I’m not a big fan of), and ended up (re)building the photo galleries from scratch using CCK file fields, Views and CSS.

Vanessa and I couldn’t decide on a single shop to put a wedding list in, so I decided to make this here Wedding website. It is a list of all the nice things that we imagine that people will want to to get us! In time, we will add maps and other wedding details, but for now it is a list linking to stuff on other random shops and websites. Once people have claimed a gift, they should put their name against it by editing the item and putting your name in the “Bought By…” field. I hope people can work it out!

I have finished a profession CV site for my friend Rael Jones, who is a musician and composer for film and television. As a music freelancer he relies primarily on his IMDB page, but has increasingly been asked for a website by prospective employers. This site in meant to be sharp, simply organised and get right to the point – Rael’s music.

I have re-built the Thumpermonkey site in Drupal. Tthe site is now entirely dynamic and super-easy to keep up to date by any of the guys in the band. This is good because (a) we have a bunch of gigs coming up and (b) I’m leaving Thumpermonkey at the end of the year, so I can hand over the admin of the site to the rest of the guys knowing that the site will always look fresh and alive.

Fun and colourful site for my friend Jessica and her new homemade cake business: A Little Of What You Fancy. This is my first full public site with Drupal, and it works really well. Jess has a log-in which allows her to add and edit content (cakes) but all the admin garbage in the background is hidden from her. Still lots to learn, but I think this looks great as a first stab.

Minor facelift and freshen up of the Tooting Bizarre netlabel site, after it was (quite correctly) described as “a little bit Windows XP”… I went for a hand-drawn background, to go with the whole “no-budget”, “do-it-yourself” mood of the site, but kept the clean white look. I just hope we can convince some more fine bands to join our motley crew and slap their music up on the site.