Richard Westenra

Project Background

I’ve been a member of the Canterbury University Snow Sports Club since my first year of uni in 2004, which makes me their longest-serving active member and committee member. During my time in club I’ve done heaps of vounteer work and held roles from CUSSC Men’s Vice-President and Transport Officer to Temple Basin assistant summer manager, goodslift operator, and media liaison. Now that I’ve got some web development and WordPress skills, I decided it was time to give the club website a bit of a sprucing up.

The old CUSSC website

For a couple of years there had been an existing WordPress site with a generic theme (shown above) that had been set up by the old webmaster, but it was dying for a redesign that more accurately represented what the club was about.

Site Description

The new site is a bespoke WordPress theme loosely based on ‘Coolwinter‘ by Website Templates. The design features that I’m most proud of include the mountain silhouette header border, and an homage to the old ski photo in the Temple lodge living-room above the footer. The committee requested that the front page incorporate a bunch of photos from the field, so I included a series of thumbnail photos in the sidebar on the right. On every other page the photo column is replaced by a sidebar containing Temple Basin’s most recent tweet, upcoming events and an event calendar, and links to past blog archives.

The new CUSSC website

Testimonial

‘Hey that’s looking really good.’ – Mhairi Rademaker, CUSSC Committee

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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

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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