Richard Westenra

Hi there, welcome to my new website, and in particular to my new blog.
Rather than a regularly-updated column, I plan to use this blog to publish occasional observations, links, or discussions. I make no promises as to the frequency, regularity or quality of posts. I’ll try to post as often as I can, but if there’s a trade-off between posting frequently and posting good content, I’ll choose the latter path. It’s a slippery slope from humourous observations about yoghurt to stereotypical weblog navel-gazing, and it’s one I hope to avoid if I can.

This winter I’ll going on a ski road trip from late July until sometime around October. During this time I’ll be voluntarily homeless as I take to the road in my venerable ‘89 Bluebird wagon to embark upon the mystical Great Winter Roadtrip. My mission: to explore every one of the 12 ski fields on the Chill pass before the winter comes to a close. To see how I’m doing, keep checking my blog for updates from the road when and if I find internet access – or to find out whether I’ve yet succumbed to hypothermia.

In the meantime, I’ll be posting a few old notes from facebook and the like, so expect to see some old posts pop up in the next month or so.

A secondary reason for maintaining a blog on this site is that it’s good practice for SEO. Blogs are great for attracting hits from search engines, because search engines love content. As search engine spiders crawl the web indexing pages, they don’t see the design of a page, they can only read text. Therefore the best way to attract them is with copious quantities of keyword-rich text. Which really just boils down to my being a marketing whore, in the end .

Anyway, enjoy the site!

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Project Background

Welcome to my portfolio, blog, and online playground. Building this site initially sounded like a dream project: no deadline, a fantastic developer-client relationship, and complete creative freedom. What I missed was how critical I’d be of my work.

When you’re designing for someone else, you listen to what they want and then you put together something you think they’ll like as quickly and efficiently as possible. When you’re designing for yourself, suddenly nothing looks right. Every tiny detail must be agonised over and thoroughly researched because the end result has to be a perfect online representation of your personality and business. This led to weeks of painstaking research and all-night caffeine-fueled design sessions.

What you see is the result. I hope you like it.

Site Description

This is first and foremost a portfolio site, but I’ve also added a blog so I can have a place to post occasional thoughts, rants and links. Blogs are also pretty good at optimising search engine hits, which is a secondary motivation.

The site design attempts to infuse a little of my own personality and interests into the site, whilst keeping it clean and easy to navigate. I have also tried to chuck in the occasional easter egg here and there, so keep an eye open for non-obvious links.

Thanks for visiting!

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Project Background

Black Swan Designs is run by Mel Blowes, a crafty entrepreneur, professional photographer and graphic designer living in Christchurch. She is involved in the Christchurch arts and crafts scene and has won various awards for her work, most recently winning the Supreme Award for the window display competition at the 2009 Ellerslie International Flower Show.

Black Swan Designs had a previously existing website (see image below), however Mel felt that the old site no longer accurately reflects the current state of her business, and was keen for a fresh look. She also had three separate web presences – her original website, her blogspot blog, and her online shops – and wanted them all put in one location. Being a graphic designer by trade, Mel was able to handle the design work. My role involved advising Mel about the web-specific aspects of design, turning the design into a working site, and also coming up with some funky javascript effects.

The original Black Swan Designs website

Site Description

The new Black Swan Designs website is a PHP brochure website featuring:
• Fully-integrated Wordpress blog
• Image galleries featuring ‘Slimbox’ image viewer and slideshows
• Auto-updating array-based navigation system with a slick Mootools motion effect
• Bespoke Content Management System (CMS) with administrator access to edit site text and admin user accounts.
• Integrated Etsy online shop listings via XML/RSS feed
• Contact form

The new Black Swan Designs home page, featuring dynamic image slideshow.

The new Black Swan Designs website includes many photo galleries featuring images of past and current products and services, as well as information about the business, her online shop listings, and contact information.

The new site also features prominent links to her two online craft stores at Felt and Etsy, plus a live display of her current Etsy listings which is integrated into the shop page with PHP thanks to Etsy’s RSS/XML feed. The new Black Swan Blog runs on Wordpress, and we were able to import her old Blogspot posts using Wordpress’s import function.

Testimonial

‘Richard was great to work with, preempting my requests on several occasions and constructing a functioning site that was 100% faithful to my original design. I enjoyed the informative emails with relevant links which made me feel a real part of the process, and look forward to working together again in the future.’ – Mel Blowes

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Project Background

Westenra Corporate Travel is my parents’ travel business. They handle the organization and planning of overseas travel for corporate clients. I designed and built this website to fulfil the criteria of the server-side project at Natcoll.

Westenra Corporate Travel home page

Site Description

Because my parents had no established logo or branding, the website required the creation of a professional identity and colour-scheme. Logo design is not normally part of my services, but I am very happy with the end result. As part of the final customer documentation, I made several versions of the logo for use in stationery and letterheads.

Westenra Corporate Travel logo pack

The site content includes information about the business, travel tools, links and advice. There is also a contact form provided for any queries featuring a reCAPTCHA Turing test.

The custom-made admin area features the ability to edit most site text, and to add, edit and delete users and their details. Feel free to check out the back end, by clicking on the link in the top right of the screen (above the map of New Zealand). The username and password are both ‘guest’. Don’t worry about breaking anything, guest users have no editing privileges so any changes you make will not be saved.

Westenra Corporate Travel admin area - Content Management System

Note: Whilst the design and development of this site is completely finished, my parents haven’t yet gotten around to editing the content, so the About and Travel Tools pages feature some placeholder text.

Testimonial

‘Richard, you understood the brief well and created a funky and easy site which exceeded our expectations. The style is contemporary, easy to navigate and use, and best of all has attracted business which is what it is all about!’ – Jeremy Westenra

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Project Background

Eva Cherry Designs is the brainchild of Rachel Bradstock, Christchurch-based fashion designer and linguist extraordinaire. Rachel uses the site to sell funky retro-style clothing, and specialises in pre-loved vintage, customised lingerie and one-off originals. The Eva Cherry Designs website also increasingly functions as Rachel’s portfolio for her work as a fashion designer.

The site design was a collaborative effort, with Rachel making initial mockups that I refined and turned into web-friendly designs. Once the final design was agreed upon, I turned it into a functioning site.

Eva Cherry Designs home page

Site Description

Eva Cherry Designs is an outwardly simple PHP brochure site with sophisticated functionality. It features integrated auction listings via Trademe’s published RSS/XML feed. This allows the site to maintain an up-to-date list of Eva Cherry’s current Trademe auctions which is updated every page-refresh.

Eva Cherry Designs' Trademe Listings

(Note: Rach can be a little slack with maintaining her Trademe account from time to time, so the odds are good that there are no listings currently visible at the time you read this. If this is the case click here to see an alternative version of the Eva Cherry products page featuring a different seller’s listings.)

The website also functions as Eva Cherry’s design portfolio. It includes three image galleries featuring the slimbox image viewer. The galleries are currently devoted to her work as a student – drawings, photos, assignments, vintage clothing, original creations and work for clients.

Note: The gallery area currently under construction, as Rachel is still in the process of gathering portfolio material.

Testimonial

‘It is physically and logically impossible to conceive of a web developer who surpasses Richard in any respect.’ – Rachel Bradstock

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Project Background

This website was built for the Natcoll Flash project, which required the creation of a web site or application made entirely in Adobe Flash CS3 and conforming to various criteria and standards. I elected to create a brochure website based on a friend’s parent’s existing website, which had excellent content but was in a state of disrepair. I presented the idea to David Coray (the existing website’s owner), who was already planning a new HTML website but welcomed any input or ideas my Flash site could provide. Lacking any better project topics, I decided to push ahead with the project, figuring that at best it could replace the existing site, and at worst I’d have a fine demonstration of my skills in Flash and Actionscript 3.

The original Silver Salmon Creek Lodge website

Site Description

The new Silver Salmon Creek Lodge website features horizontal navigation with animated drop-down menus, ‘pie-chart’ page preloaders, smooth animated scroll-bar movements, and interactive image slideshows.

The new Silver Salmon Creek Lodge website

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Project Background

This site was built for the Design & Usability project at Natcoll. It was constructed entirely in Adobe Photoshop CS3, which demonstrates the power of Photoshop to accomplish more than just photo-editing. Using mainly the image-slice and export-to-html features I was able to create a passable website without once opening a text-editor.

Real Recycling home page

Site Description

This is a Photoshop design mockup only, and is intended as a kind of interactive design demonstration. Whilst most of the links work, it features limited web functionality and is intended only to demonstrate the design in a browser.

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