Anyway, more to the point. First of all I’ve made the changes, although there are still a few more to go before the spring cleaning of the site is complete. I’ve changed the background of the site (the ornate look) for a more detailed design. I hope that people will agree that it looks much better than before. Also to compliment this, I’ve decided to use a header replacement system to use fonts for my headings which I think make the site look much more slick than before. The other thing I’ve done is changed the featured project on the main page to a bunch of equally sized screenshots of my latest designs which lead to their respective portfolio page (only one of them though at the moment…will work more on that after university is finished). I think it’s looking like it’s improved quite a bit from just a few changes and hasn’t had to be completely redesigned which is a big bonus.

Now this is more important news, especially for my career. In the final year of my university course, in each semester we get a client that wants something making for them and they give a prize at the end of the semester to the one that they choose. In this semester, it was the engineering company Malthouse Engineering that wanted a complete overhaul of their website done. As my project is done now, you can see the results in my portfolio.

Anyway, a long story short, yesterday they came into the class to have a final look at the designs that people in my class had done. As they came over to look at mine, I was feeling quite nervous but I think that I presented my design quite well and they left me with some really positive comments which I was happy about.

After they had seen everyone’s designs, they then retreated to the corridor to discuss which design they were going to choose for their company. They came back in and it was all quite tense, I think I was actually shaking from the excitement of it all. When they uttered the words “the winner is Robin”, I didn’t quite know how to react. I went up to the front of the class feeling more nervous than I have in my entire life, however it was also one of the best feelings I had experienced as I had never won anything like this before, not to mention that this module which is my only web based one this semester was the one that I wanted to do best in and it seems to have paid off. The prize they gave was £300 which in itself was a brilliant thing for the end of university for me.

Afterwards, people that hadn’t gotten to see my site came over to have a look and see, I got some really nice comments from people and was thoroughly pleased about the whole thing. One comment that stuck out for me and actually made me feel quite nice was someone saying to me that I’d be going places, that really meant a lot to me.

I think it’s worth mentioning that there were some really good designs that people had made in the class and I’m sure it was a really difficult decision for Malthouse to make, but they chose my website design out of all of the really great designs in the class and that just makes me feel extra special.

Let’s hope this is not only the highlight of my university life but the start of a good career too.

I’ve done a lot more work over the last year or so, which isn’t shown on the website which currently only displays two of my designs. I feel that when university is finished, I should spruce the design up a little bit and make the site feel more pleasant to get around. Currently, a few of the things I don’t like are things like the header, which is a bit stale and just doesn’t work. Also, the sub content could do with a revamp on some pages where it gets a little thinner compared to the home page. The portfolio section especially needs some work. I feel that it just looks flat and unexciting with content that is far longer than it needs to be in order to show off my designs.

As well as updating segments of the design, I will be making more of the site editable. For example, at the moment, the home page contains featured portfolio and a list of what is contained on my portfolio. This section is editable, however the text on the right is not. This is due to my previous lack of experience with WordPress, and now that I know how to create multiple editable regions, I’ll treat my site to that so I can edit content easier and make the site much nicer for me to work with.

Anyway, this is pretty much a bit of a “note to self” type blog post, but for anyone reading, expect some nice changes around about May.

I’ve made it so that pages are now easy to update and projects are easy to add. There might be things I need to change at a later date but for now they work just how I want them to.

Being a member of the Web Designer Forum I thought I’d make the most out of this redesign and submit my site for nomination for the July Website of the Month award on their forum. Whilst it’s only a community thing, it means quite a bit if I am successful because it’s voted on by fellow web designers, so while it’s not an Oscar, it’s important within the area of web design. From previous months entries, I have to say it’ll be hard to do well, but hopefully all will go well. Voting takes place from July 19th – July 31st.

The simple and blocky colour scheme, bold text, and overall design was actually inspired by Persona 3’s Interface designs. At the time, I was thinking of ideas for my new site design, and I had already known that I wanted it to be simple and easy to organise. I started getting into some Playstation 2 RPG’s and came across Persona 3. Little did I know, that this game would also become a source of inspiration for the design of my personal website.

There’s still a lot of work that needs doing, like adding the portfolio page, but it will get there. Personally I think the design this time is a bit risky, but hopefully people will appreciate that I’m not being lazy, but actually trying to make a minimalistic design work well.

Anyway, I’m glad to have the semesters work off of my shoulders now and look forward to a well earnt rest.

I promise that when university is over for the semester I will continue working on my website and I intend to get it completed over the christmas holidays and maybe even submit it for webdesignforum.co.uk’s website of the month. I’m not sure how well my site would fare, but it’d be a great start to the year if I did pretty well.

I’ll probably post back up somewhere near the completion of the site, so until then…take care.

Well…I made a mistake when trying to download my websites files when I was at university and instead of downloading the files so that I could work on them, I uploaded my laptops old files. WordPress didn’t like this and I scratched my head for hours trying to figure out how to get my main website working again.

In the end, I decided to delete it all and wait until I got home so I could just re install WordPress and my latest version of the site stright from my computer. I did just that, and it still wasn’t working! I was getting pretty stressed out at this point so I asked my good friend Gustaf if he could help. One of the first things he suggested to me was to check the wp-config.php file to see if there were any errors, and for some reason I had it in my head that I’d already checked it and that I hadn’t overwritten it. I spend about an hour or so messing around with my .htaccess file to see if anything was wrong with that, then for some reason I decided to check out the wp-config file because I remembered that it contains the information about the databases. I checked it and lo and behold, I found that the file was empty.

After filling the file back in with the correct information it worked like a charm and the problem was solved. So the lesson for today is not to delete everything unless you’ve done absolutely everything you can!