20 February 2006: Paul Elsam is an actor and teacher who has written a book (on teaching people to act) and required a website to support it. The book's out on the 27th of Feb, so the website had to be up and running for then (which it was .. well, by 10am on that day).
Paul was quite a model client .. his brief showed that he'd thought through the different types of person who would use his website and what he wanted them to see. I've never had that from a client before, I usually have to use chinese burns to get that sort of detail. He didn't have any idea how the site should look, but had lots of materials for me to play with .. perfect.
One of the materials Paul provided was a boxful of venetian masks from which I was able to extract the background textures. I tried various other ways of using the images but this seemed the most successful. We also had plans to use line drawings of people in expressive poses but they didn't quite seem to have a place, well, nothing came out within the tight budget limits this site was constructed within.
On this site many years ago I saw what seemed to be the perfect way to sell books online. Basically, provide the first bits free and .. well what happened to me was I read all the first bits and then when it came to the decision whether to buy or not it seemed obvious that, since I'd read so far, I clearly found the book at least readable and plausible and I bought the book. So that's what I've tried to recreate here.
The only other thing that's unusual about this site is my attempt to keep everything 'above the fold' (on the same page, at least for those with an average sized screen or larger) which leads to a combination of hierarchical navigation .. just the one level from the menu .. together with linear navigation when people are reading the book or working through the further resources. Does that work? Is it clear? The site's simple enough to get away with it I think.
This client did want to take over the maintenance of the site himself so it may have changed if you're looking at it a while after I wrote this. The price below includes a couple of hours of training at his home (and email setup) so that he's able to make the changes he needs. Of course for more complex redesigns or just if he runs out of time I'm always here in support.
The site was created in 18 hours over 6 elapsed weeks at a cost of £847.72 including a year's hosting and two years of the domain name. Paul said looking good. Sounding good, judging by your very pro approach. Thanks for being so speedy, I'm not used to such professionalism! All still looking very good .. cheers once again John. Website is looking fab, thank you John for all this.