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Law at the University of Winchester (2007)

July 5, 2009 By drbexl Leave a Comment
  • Following discussions with David Chalk, I produced an online presence for the new law degree at the University of Winchester in under 10 hours, using information prepared for print, re-purposing/structuring for the web, and uploading information using the University’s Content Management System. I suggested appropriate image types, which were then provided by the University marketing team.
  • Further time was then spent investigating other University Law websites to look for other possiblities for web content, some of which was implemented. It was noted that few sites had an interactive element, so further time was spent investigating possible blogs to use, and researching types of questions which could usefully be used upon the website to engage potential students in legal debate, thus building a relationship with the University.
  • The remaining time in the 40 hours allocated was spent providing a comprehensive document and training session for David Chalk to enable him to keep the website updated, and particularly advice on what would usefully work for ‘Blawg’, and the extensive amount of offline work which would need to be done to encourage participation. It was noted that it would be best that blog content was best provided by David, as Head of Law.

Client Feedback:
What impressed me most about Bex’s work was her ability to take a brief from a total web site novice and make sense of it and produce in a rapid time a site that more than met my expectations. Very well laid out with imiginative links from what have been an unpromising brief!”
David Chalk, 2009
Head of Law, University of Winchester

Visit: http://www.winchester.ac.uk/law

Filed Under Portfolio Tagged With #Success, Blogging, Client Feedback, drbexl, Google Blogger, Law, Portfolio, University of Winchester

Web Usability (2001-2002)

July 5, 2009 By drbexl 3 Comments

These pages are the result of a 5 month project investigating what makes a web page usable, and thus effective.

  • Members of staff in all departments of the University of Winchester (formerly King Alfred’s College/University College Winchester) were questioned as to the use that they would possibly make of webpage design (within teaching, research, and assessment).
  • Usability and information structure were deemed more important than aesthetics, although this was still a consideration.
  • Designed primarily for use by students, the site offers options for web design, rather than hard and fast rules, the site was also designed to meet the needs of academic staff who were seeking to teach theories of web design.
  • The site was designed to be largely static, as it is more issue-led, rather than a ‘how-to’ of the latest web building software. Although the site is now rather out of date, a lot of the issues to be thought-through remain relevant.

Client Comment

“Dr Bex Lewis was the designer and implementer of a pioneering website at the university which aimed to support lecturers in teaching about web design. This was at a time when web sites were put together hurriedly with many basic mistakes. That website is still available and and stands up remarkbly well, giving sound advice. Would that more web designers would take the time to look at it”

David Rush, 2009

Business IT

University of Winchester

Visit: http://www.winchester.ac.uk/designproject/

Filed Under Portfolio Tagged With #Success, Accessibility, Client Feedback, drbexl, Portfolio, University of Winchester, Usability, Web Accessibility, Web Usability

WW2Poster Blog (2009-2010)

July 4, 2009 By drbexl 1 Comment

Having been quoted in the Daily Express, I started to track the success of the Keep Calm and Carry On slogan. With time, I will add some of the material that I collected for my PhD thesis to this blog (although preferably not losing out on publication opportunities). This blog is designed to complement my website: http://www.ww2poster.co.uk (which seriously needs updating), and is the first time I have seriously published on WordPress (although I’ve been playing around with the platform since January), and extracts earlier entries from my random blogger blog.

http://ww2poster.wordpress.com/ (now integrated with the website)

Success: Led to an article in the New York Times.

Filed Under Portfolio Tagged With #Success, Blogging, drbexl, Keep Calm and Carry On, Portfolio, Press Coverage, Research, WordPress, ww2poster

Bookwells/P&G Wells (2005, 2008)

July 4, 2009 By drbexl Leave a Comment

P&G Wells is a beautiful bookshop nestled in the streets of Winchester. The brief was to design a simple, static site encompassing the six different businesses affiliated with the site.

  • Time was short, so the initial design was produced quickly. Halfway through development of the site, I knew I’d got the job in Manchester, so passed the site over with instructions as to how to keep it updated, providing training as appropriate.
  • The colouring was chosen to work with current branded materials – with enough images to make it interesting, but without slowing the site down. The site was designed for functionality, fast download and good accessibility.
  • Separate (but similar) templates were built for each area of the business to allow flexibility within the site for different book reviews, etc.
  • The interactive order form was designed by jholt web site services.
  • 2009: We’ve adapted the site so that the information is up to date, and are in discussions re: the possibility of a WordPress based site!

Vist: http://www.bookwells.co.uk

Filed Under Portfolio Tagged With Bookwells, P&G Wells, Portfolio, SME

Winchester Holistics (since 2006)

July 4, 2009 By drbexl Leave a Comment

After discussions and research, I designed and structured a friendly small business website. We wanted to keep the site simple as Tina had no desire to update it, and I couldn’t guarantee being available when the site needed updating.

I studied at other ‘holistic practitioner’ sites so that I could recommend to Tina the kind of content that would be worthwhile, and also took on board the ideas she already had for what it would contain.

On paper I outlined how I thought the site would work, and then we purchased a domain name and web-hosting space from 1&1, I designed the site using Dreamweaver and images purchased from iStockphoto, and the site went live. I recommended to Tina a number of things that she could do to promote the site offline.

Following discussions site with Tina, we renamed the company in 2008 (from Reflexive feet to Winchester Holistics) to reflect the wider range of treatments she offers, and the design of the new site can be seen here. We’re completing a rework of the material, as Tina focuses more on myfascial release than the hotstones.

Visit: http://www.winchester-holistics.co.uk

Previous Design

Filed Under Portfolio Tagged With Portfolio, SME, Winchester Holistics

Bex Lewis (1997-2010)

July 3, 2009 By drbexl 1 Comment

Personal pages are the ideal place to experiment with different techniques, colours, and generally ‘play’, although I still want my pages to look good, be informational about me, easy to navigate, and reasonably fast loading.

Hosted by freenetname (now madasafish), my ISP, comes with 100MB of hosting. In November 2008 I gave my site (in existence since 1998) a quick makeover to make it look a bit fresher, more relevant, and removed many of the space-hogging photos. The initial driver for putting up the site was to provide photos for friends and family scattered across the UK/around the world, but with blogs and Facebook this has become less necessary, and I will remove all aside from a small selection of images (reducing some privacy issues)

The site is designed to provide:

  • the photos at the top give a quick drbexl-bio of my varied interests
  • an ‘extended CV’ to support any job applications;
  • a place to keep a record of a selection of sites in relation to my hobbies and interests;
  • a space for highlighting e-campaigns;
  • links to other sites, including blogs/Facebook; and
  • my current ‘wishlist’ for things I am saving up for.

With each version of the site (first launched in 1997), I maintain a similar colour theme throughout, and there’s rarely a need to start from scratch at any point. I re-use information where necessary, restructure according to my new plans, and add whatever my current interests are. In January 2009, to go with my new, more-positive outlook on life, I added a stronger purple-ness to the site!

The site is built with Dreamweaver, using a table structure (will shortly be re-constructed using CSS), and editable regions within a template.

See: http://www.bex-lewis.co.uk

Previous Designs

Filed Under Portfolio Tagged With bex-lewis.co.uk, CV, interests, Personal, Portfolio, Website

The Art of War at The National Archives (2005)

July 3, 2009 By drbexl Leave a Comment

Whilst The National Archives were looking for artist biography material, they came across my website www.ww2poster.co.uk, read about my PhD thesis, and decided they needed my expertise. I was contracted in as an editorial consultant.

Following any necessary extra research, I wrote the following content for the site:

  • About 95% of the captions, and the group descriptions, for the illustrations and propaganda sections
  • The information on INF 3 and the Ministry of Information
  • Much of the information on artists was taken from my website, plus I did further research, and wrote some of the entries.

The images and original records are free to view and are available on www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/artwar. As well as downloading the artwork and the history behind it, online visitors could send selected images to their mobile phone or as e-cards. Visitors can also arrange to visit The National Archives to see the originals, others in the collection, and the finished posters.

Filed Under Portfolio Tagged With National Archives, Portfolio, Research, second world war propaganda posters, The Art of War, Website

Arca Archaeological Consultancy (2009)

July 3, 2009 By drbexl Leave a Comment

ARCA is an archeological consultancy based at the University of Winchester. ARCA’s website hadn’t been updated since 2005, when the consultancy was first formed.

The Brief

As agreed in conversation with Keith Wilkinson

  • Critique other UK archaeological consultancy websites, identifying appropriate elements.
  • Construct a clear, visually pleasing, usable site, using images/content provided by ARCA: Create a favicon for the site
  • Provide fade-in rotating images on the site.
  • Provide a useful search function.
  • Request a perma-email-address.
  • Optimise the site for search engines.
  • Create a structure to allow for reduced-versions of the site in French and Dutch.

74.5 hours were provided for the project. The site is nearly complete, in considerably under that time.

Visit: http://www.arcauk.com

Filed Under Portfolio Tagged With Arca Archeological Consultancy, Portfolio, SME, University of Winchester

Second World War Posters (since 1997)

July 3, 2009 By drbexl 1 Comment

The site ww2poster.co.uk was constructed as an electronic resource to gather data and disseminate the research-in-progress for my PhD. The website ranks highly on Google, and has been referred to as one of the top poster-websites in James Aulich War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communication (Thames & Hudson, Imperial War Museum), 2007, receiving around 500 unique visitors per day from visitors worldwide. The site has generated contacts from other academics working in the field, and information from artists’ relatives.

This screendump illustrates the initial page for the www.ww2poster.co.uk website, which uses a poster image that rotates daily over the week.

  • The site started from humble beginnings in 1997, with a single page, detailing the aims of my PhD, on Tripod.
  • The site continued to grow and grow organically, until I decided that it had spiralled out of control, and set to develop a well planned and aesthetically pleasing site, but was limited to using Word 97.
  • I soon realised that Word produced ‘mucky code’, and started to learn basic HTML, and in 2001 attended one-to-one training to learn Macromedia Dreamweaver 4.0 and Adobe PhotoShop 5.5, and redesigned and restructured the site using the techniques learnt.
  • The design is formed on tables, which means that the design works with whatever size screen the user uses (I try to do this wherever possible), and is heavily information focused.
  • Usability and accessibility are key to the design of the site, although more recent developments need to be studied, as my site is not entirely ‘Bobby Approved‘, to comply with disability legislation. Some examples of accessible features include the use of Alt Tags and Meta Tags, breadcrumbs and search fucntions.
  • The search function is essential to the site, as approximately 50% of people are ‘searchers’, but a clear structure to the site is also important, as the other 50% are ‘browsers’.
  • Hosted by 1and1.co.uk.

With the PhD is now finished, and in response to the various questions that I get asked, the site underwent redevelopment.

  • I wanted to use XML, but poor teaching techniques mean that this was not learnt, and I have decided to use a simple contemporary (HTML) design which facilitates easy use of the information on site.
  • The new site still used information from the old site, but gives more options for development, and uses transferable skills from research PhD in extracting relevant information and structuring it in a useful way to those who use the site.
  • Re-thinking the site has meant thinking about those areas that are most heavily used and make my site unique, for instance, the information on artists has been given its own section, rather than hidden.
  • Usability and accessibility, through the use of careful structuring, thoughtful information and images, colours and layout, is expected to be key.

The site uses a dual structure for webpages:

  • The site is built on a table structure (planning to change this for accessibility reasons).
  • The key content navigation is available at the top of the screen, but extra navigation is available at the base of the page (as convention allows for this), with links to information about the author (me), a site map, ‘FAQ’, and copyright information, as I look to comply with legal and ethical considerations. These all need to be developed further.
  • A discrete visitor count is available at the base of the front page (which assumes that all visitors come through this page, although this is not always the case), and more information on this can be obtained from my site host. Around 500 unique visitors are on the site every day.

http://www.ww2poster.co.uk, now accompanied by a blog http://ww2poster.wordpress.com/

Previous Designs

Filed Under Portfolio Tagged With Portfolio, Research, second world war propaganda posters, ww2poster
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