Richard Westenra

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.

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.

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.

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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