I have also been working on a new project for Zehr Demolition. Laurie Zehr, the owner of Zehr Demolition has been looking for a big refresh of his current website and we discussed what type of content and goals for search engine optimization he had. So far everything is going smoothly, and the project should be completed in the near future. You can see a small preview below.

Seeing as I am not a sports afficionado, doing a hockey goalie school website was a bit of a challenge. There was definitely a bit of confusion on my part as to what the client wanted initially. I also wasn’t able to find many decent looking hockey websites, or sports websites for that matter. Most of these websites suffer from clutter overload so to speak. They try to cram as many stats and links as possible into countless columns. If they don’t suffer that problem then you usually find that the websites are just poorly done graphically, or have poor layout, or suffer from all of the above.

After several mock-ups and feedback from Jag as well as their client, I started to get the feel for what the client was looking for. Once I knew what to go for, creating a design that worked for him didn’t take too long in photoshop. After that there was a lot of html + css work as well as a ton of content to manage and the backend to style.

The end result is something I’m quite pleased with — heck I even got to place a few CSS transparencies in the calendar and drop down menu.

Oh the irony — everything but the most important PSD files were in the table of contents in my hard drive. While I will try to see if there is an affordable solution to get my external repaired or get the important files off it, I think I’m going to have to accept the fact that I have to redo the whole psd file now. My only consolation is that I know exactly what i have to do and have my code all complete — but I’ve lost a hard drive as a result of stupidly not backing up the past week.

As for the project I am currently (or was) finishing up, it is a hockey goalie school website that I am being subcontracted out to design and code (html + css). It has been a tough project for me simply because I don’t watch hockey, and for that matter any sport at all. Couple this with the fact that 99% of sports and hockey websites out there have sub par designs and you’ve got an inspiration problem. Long story short, it’s gone through many a revision and it has been quite a learning experience.

I’ll be eventually posting these designs up properly, but since I don’t have the PSDs anymore, I can’t do much with the designs.

While there were a ton of steps before this they were pretty ugly. Here is where it started to look half way decent:

• RED Design
• Glassy White Design
  
• Dark Blue Grunge Design

And this is how it looks right now (big changes):

• Revised Dark Grunge + Coded

Unfortunately it still needs revisions in the graphics, which means I need to edit my PSD file. But wait! I dont have any PSD files of that design or any of the previous 3 versions. Looks like I have to recreate this whole thing from scratch! I hate to sound like a broken record but I’m fairly depressed about this.

Since I’m now in the dropbox beta, I’m thinking of trying that out as an online backup/sync/file transfer solution. It’s worked quite well with friends right now — it is something to think about anyway.

As a side note, I’m going to remove that theme chooser soon. It’s positioning is screwed up in Firefox 3 and honestly is a pain to deal with multiple styles. I’m going to focus on creating a much better theme for this website. Something maybe with more vectors and texture? Or maybe something with photography. It needs to say more and expand outside of whats a typical looking site. Hopefully I can achieve something like that.

More soon.

For those who are interested, check it out.

Here’s a snippet of one of my brainstorms:

So, of course, it was back to the drawing boards, and I came up with this blue look that I think is clean and dark, but has a good splash of color, and suitable contrast to make things appear readable and fresh. I think keeping it clean and simple was important for this site–and like any website, I think the content should be the focus. Website graphics merely serve to present your reader with a nice visually appealing content delivery mechanism for your eyes. That was so jargon and buzzworld filled I think I may have to stop typing right now.

Anyway, I’m hoping to change the gallery to lightbox2 so long as its

A) not a huge bother
B) styles well (looking for a few specific things)
C) works well as a gallery, within wordpress.

Its incredibly late, and I’m still hungry, time for food and sleep. More updates will come tomorrow.

The red/grey one is the original variation of the two, but after getting over the cool factor, it seemed that maybe it might be too heavy/darth maul, for some people. This simple fact forced me to create a much more friendly version of the same thing which will become the default theme for the website. I will however allow users to choose their own theme out of the 3 that will be available.

The Current Orange theme however is still being tweaked. things like the width of the site and the look of the typography are still being adjusted. The new light CMS brings new territory so consider this site “beta” for the time being.

More soon.