This is a redesign of the blog, which runs on Drupal 6 and features a blog and photo galleries. It’s not the first Drupal-based theme I’ve ever created, but certainly the one I’m happiest with.

If you want to know a little bit more about the process behind designing the site, I wrote about my aims for the site, then followed up today with some notes on why I made certain design decisions.

My feeling is that the design is quite unique and a good starting point for establishing an identifiable presence on the Internet. Here’s a screen-shot:

I’ll have a bit more information on this design in the portfolio in the neat future.

This is the first website for Lisburn Removals, a family-run removal business based in the city of Lisburn. The company deals with domestic and commercial removals both within Northern Ireland/Ireland and further afield, as well as providing secure storage facilities for customers.

The site is a brochure site intended to show the range of work Lisburn Removals can carry out.

After spending some time trying to tweak the website, it became clear that it wasn’t serving the company’s needs. They commissioned Scribble Designs to completely overhaul the website to give them a modern site with full flexibility.

The new site is built using ASP.NET 2.0 and provides a more flexible content management system which allows the administrators to easily add new pages and sections. The site’s back-end sports new file and image management facilities and a whole host of new features.

I’ll have more information on the web design portfolio page shortly.

Of course, with my interest being primarily in web design, search engine optimisation and all that malarkey, I ended up writing semi-regularly to Interweb and neglecting the blog here at Scribble Designs.

Why was this a mistake?

Several reasons:

• The tech blogging market is severely overcrowded, unless you’ve got the time to create something really special.
• Unless you’re a field leader like Darren Rowse, your money making opportunities from a tech blog are severely limited.
• The themes of Scribble and Interweb were similar, yet I was doubling the effort to build content on both blogs instead of making one really great blog.
• Because the blogs were split, I had to market both blogs as well. Double the effort for everything. Leaving comments on other blogs, building backlinks to two blogs instead of one.

It was a blog post by Raj Dash over at Performancing that made me decide to concentrate the two blogs into one. And instead of trying to make money through advertising, I’m hoping the more focussed content here will serve to solidify my experience. It’s not all about Google AdSense, don’t you know!

What this means is that I’ll be slightly redesigning the Scribble Designs site to reflect the kind of work I’ve been doing for the last few years. I’ll be sharing my experiences of things that have worked for me in the past and things that haven’t. And, like my heroes over at SEOmoz, I’ll probably share a little more information than is commercially viable for a web designer!

We went to the Greenmount show last year and had a great time. It was a massive event and really well attended locally, so hopefully we’ll see a good turnout at the weekend! Depending on the weather, of course!

BiblioIreland is part of a portfolio of websites focusing on Irish literature. It’s sister sites are Books Ulster, an online bookstore and Library Ireland – an impressive repository of downloadable Irish books.

The objective of BiblioIreland is to provide a guide to Irish books based on information gathered during a 20-year career as a bookseller:

we had been Irish booksellers for 20 years and over that period had collected a lot of data on books relating to Ireland – so, we thought, why not use that data as the basis for a guide to books on Ireland

Because of the sheer volume of material, we decided to use the blogging platform, WordPress as the basis for a content management system to store the book information. We were able to use a number of ready-made WordPress plugins to enhance the user experience. For instance, tagging has been used to classify each book within the site as well as broader categories to help visitors find related material.

Funding was a bit of a problem, so we started taking on web design work in order to raise the capital for the first print run. Scribble Designs became a web design company, which we’re more than happy about – we’ve worked with some amazing clients and on a number of diverse web design projects in Northern Ireland.

Today, though, Lisa and I are pleased to announce the launch of our first set of flashcards aimed at pre-school age children. We’re calling them “First Words Picture Cards”.

Each pack contains 34 hand-illustrated flashcards. The cards are brightly coloured and realistic depictions of everyday objects that children will find familiar. There is also a parent/teacher card with recommended ways to use and enjoy the cards with your children.

We’ll be developing an eShop shortly to sell this and other ranges that we are currently developing. In the meantime, if you would like to buy a set of our flashcards, visit our Educational Products page where you can make your purchase via PayPal.

The site is a simple brochure website, designed using a combination of Web Standards and Macromedia Dreamweaver templates. The templating system means that new pages can be added to the site with great ease. The use of Web Standards, XHTML and CSS means that the pages are constructed to ensure cross-browser compatibility and accessibility for disabled users. Another benefit of Web Standards is that the page structure is more friendly toward search engine spiders, enabling them to ‘read’ the site more easily than if nested tables were being used.

Crosshill Carpet Services provide domestic and industrial/commercial cleaning services to homes and businesses all over Northern Ireland. Their website is available at http://www.crosshillcarpetservices.co.uk. You can also get more information about the development of the site in our web design portfolio.

Scribble Designs have just completed work on an all-new website dedicated to Reality TV shows in the UK!

The site is called Unreality TV and has been released just in time for the second series of X-Factor on ITV this Autumn. Unreality is run by a team of bloggers from Northern Ireland, fervent reality TV addicts using funky pseudonyms like Tabby Kat and Brad Mullet.

We built Unreality TV using the WordPress blogging platform and custom themes, and Scribble Designs were also responsible for the creation of the cartoon characters at the head of the site – Brad Mullet and the Evil TV – and as new bloggers are added to the team, cartoons will be created for them too!

Anyway, we’ll shortly have more information on the Unreality TV site in the portfolio section. In the meantime, please feel free to check out Unreality TV!