Richard Westenra

Project Background

Sam of Spinifex approached me shortly after I finished studying with a job offer: he was a graphic designer with no web experience wanting to expand into web design, and I was looking for freelance website jobs. By working together, we could both expand our job prospects and hopefully build a good working partnership. The first site Sam wanted me to build was his own.

Site Description

The Spinifex Design website is basically a portfolio site built on the WordPress platform. The home page contains thumbnails and short descriptions of Spinifex’s past projects, each of which has its own page with a fancy mootools slideshow gallery displaying images of that project.

Testimonial

‘Thanks for the site Rich, it looks great! Very impressed with the loading speed, even with all those images, and the gallery is working just the way I imagined. Cheers.’ – Sam Worsp

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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

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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