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Today I have begun work on a new website design. The site is for a local business and it is a huge upgrade of their current site. I have already made some minor changes to their current design, but not a lot could be done with their current site, I did not design the current site! In case you haven’t guessed what the site is, it is a site for wedding cars and limos, as well as a taxi company.

Above is a picture of how the site currently sits, as you can see a lot of work needs to be done to it to make it more inviting and to add some life to it. Currently the site is too dark and dull and does not contain enough information for the visitors or potential clients.

My client is in a bit of a rush to have this site upgraded, so a deadline of approximately a week has been set. This is a tight deadline, considering the amount of work that needs to be done, I am used to having more time to complete a site.

So what all I am going to be doing to this site? First off it is going to be sitting on an entirely new domain name, at the moment the domain name is a bit of a mouthful at 19 characters in length! The current domain is annavillalimousines.com , it is just too long to expect someone to remember when going to look up your business and it’s not exactly snappy enough either. The new domain name however is much simpler to remember and I will keep it quiet until I have the site launched.

The next change is the biggest, it is the entire site! From concept to design to code and implementation, it has all been left to me to create something new, brighter and more inviting to potential customers. I will be designing the new site in Photoshop, and work has already begun on that, last night I made up a quick draft of the site and today I made lots of changes to it in relation to colours.

Tomorrow I will be showing my design idea to the client to see if he likes it or if there is something different that he wants done with it. Before I used to hate having to build websites from scratch, I am great when it comes to the coding side of things, but design is not my strong point at all. Now however I have learnt how to use Photoshop to get the results I like so I am a lot more comfortable with designing sites from scratch and I now find it much more interesting and fun!

Once the design gets the go ahead it will be on to making the rest of the content for the remaining pages of the site and then I will begin the stage of coding! I want to build this design using the WordPress platform, it is my native platform that I use for websites and I know it inside out by now.

I used to never know how to build a theme for WordPress, but over this last summer I looked into building WordPress themes and I realised they are really simple once you get though one.

Also by using WordPress it gives me the ability to enhance the websites presence online by adding some strong SEO to the site, thanks to the many plugins available from the WordPress community.

The final step to this site will be to create a Facebook group and promote it, it’s always great to have a client that wants there site to be a bit more modern and integrate it with social networks!

I don’t know how many times I have said that my new theme for this blog will be coming soon. To be honest I have had loads of new themes for this blog designed, I just was never happy with them.

Last time I mentioned my new theme I had bought a WordPress template for ThemeForest, since writing that post, I have changed my mind again. This time I have another theme from ThemeForest, I won’t say which one yet, I will say that once I finally but the theme up.

Current blog design

I am still not sure when I will have the theme ready. There is still a few bugs in it that I am trying to figure out. The main bug I am working on at the moment is the footer, it looks fine, but it suddenly becomes huge in height if the visitor searched for something, for example “a”. I have tried so many things to make the footer a set height, but it will not just take to the CSS code I am setting it, there is a lot of CSS files in this theme, so editing something small, does take some time.

The theme is definitely a huge change from this current theme, it is definitely brighter, everything is easier to read, the blog post section is about 200px wider and I expect my blog to load a hell of a lot faster! So once I am happy with the theme, I will have it up, hopefully soon !

Last night I went over to Themeforest to have a look at some designs and then noticed that it was Evanto’s birthday!

Not that it means anything to me, it just means that they have had their sites up for four years now. Four years is a long time, especially online. Being able to keep a site alive for any long period of time is a huge success.

So why am I making a post about Evanto’s birthday? Well it is because they have a huge special offer on. To celebrate their birthday they have put together a huge bundle, which has 50 different items from all across there sites; 3Docean,  ActiveDen, AudioJungle, ThemeForest, VideoHive, GraphicRiver and CodeCanyon.

I bought the bundle last night, I might not use everything at the moment, but I know the bits I don’t use now, will most likely be useful at some stage.

This bundle contains, Photoshop design files, after effects custom effects for you video’s, music, website templates with one for wordpress and a whole load of other nice things.

They are giving the bundle away for $20 which is about €16. The total that the bundle adds up to if you bought everything individually is at least $400!

To be honest you might not buy everything in the bundle, but there is definitely a lot in it. Your $20′s is really well spent here, because if you are into web design like myself there is plenty of nice graphics that could come in handy at some stage down the line.

You may not use everything now, but when you finally decide that you would of liked to have it, it will be too late as there bundle is only available for five days. Now when I am writing this post there is just about 1 day 13 hours left.

So if you want to get the bundle, click here, and enjoy!