Hollywood cakes is a custom party cake building company. They specialise in making big centerpieces for weddings and other big events. They wanted a website to promote their cakes and they asked me to build it. The brief was to design something which looked “Hollywood” and was stylish and classy. It was important to keep the design simple and easy to use, but also with a “glitzy sparkle”. I came up with a few different ideas and we chose the best bits of them and combined them into the final design.

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Once the client was happy with the design I turned the created an XHTML/CSS template and integrated this into a content management system. This made it easy for the client to keep the site up to date. I also added “Buy Now” buttons, linked to a Paypal account so that the cakes could be ordered from the website.

You can see the site live at: http://hollywoodcakes.org

Ben’s work has exceeded our expectations on every level. Our new website looks fantastic and it was a joy to work with Ben - he had plenty of time to explain things to us and made the whole process really easy. We would recommend him to anyone wanting to create a website! Thanks! - Max Wilson

I worked on this site for a year in 2006/7. <a href=”http://liammoody.co.uk”>Liam</a> did most of the design work, and I built the back end.

The site enables users to search for campsites with a wide range of variables, so they can find their perfect match. The system checks availability for every site in the search and returns booking options for the user. It also integrates with an online booking system.

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This site also provided an internal booking system for sales staff to take telephone bookings and generate itineraries. This system streamlined the booking process and made it much more efficient.

The site is still live, although I no longer work on it, so I can’t take the blame/credit for it’s current state:

http://alanrogers.travel

Trowbridge is the Rolls Royce of the Interior design world. They provide high quality images to interior designers. The range of photography that is available through Trowbridge had been long overlooked, so I built this site to raise the profile of these classic photographs and enable designers to order prints online.

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This was my introduction to the power of database driven websites using MySQL and PHP, and I learnt a huge amount in the process. There were also a range of challenges to try and make the ordering process as simple as possible, which required a long process of refinements.

One aspect of the design which I was particularly pleased with was the frame around the images. The frame is separate from the image itself, which means that the frame image will only have to load once no matter how many images you look at. This increased the efficiency of the site.