Musical Theatre Training

musicaltheatretraining.com - designed for Trinity College of Music in conjunction with RaveMedia, and funded by The Creative Way, the website offers general useful information about getting training within the Musical Theatre industry. RaveMedia carried out filming of some current Musical Theatre students in the form of interviews where the students answer questions about their experiences of applying, auditioning and finding information about different colleges and courses.

The site is accessible to WCAG-Priority 3, and the whole site has been programmed in and validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. The site uses video, although it has been designed so that if any users are not able to access video due to available technology, then the site will still work well and also provide full texts of the interviews with students. Not seen very much on video, but in fact an accessiblity requirement, is the use of Closed Captioning over the videos. Pico Design provided the following services for the design and build of this site.

• Information Architecture
• Site design and build
• Video player technology using Timed Text (XML) closed captioning.
• Video encoding
• Photo editing, enhancement and framing
• Search engine optimisation
• Submitting site to Search engines
• Detailed custom Accessibility page

The Creative Work Place

A recently launched site which was a complete overhaul of an existing website. A website was required that reflected the company's professional methods and services, and which also followed the colour and design of their existing quality stationary. The site also needed a web presence, so the new site was optimised for search engines and submitted to the main ones.

Visit The Creative Work Place.

Cumulus Conference London 2009

A website designed to replicate an initial PDF design style. This site was designed for Ravensbourne College in London who hosted the Cumulus Conference, London in 2009. The site, although basic at first appearance, is accessible to AAA standard, has a sitemap and accessibility page, has been search engine optimised and submitted to the main ones, and every page is valid XHTML. The Cumulus site also has a map, and a link is provided so that users can download a full PDF map of the area if they wish.

Although the site was based on a PDF design, the way it was built and the way it worked had to be adapted so that the design would work on the web, had to be easy to edit by others and most of all be an accessible website. The site was indexed quickly by Google, and is performing extremely well in the search results. Visit Cumulus London 2009.

Per Capita, Cardiff Bay

A brand new version of the Per Capita site has just been launched. The new site is designed to be bold and clean, larger than the previous site for an increased web presence. The new Per Capita website has been designed to stretch to fit the browser window, and has been designed to work well on the iPhone Safari browser.

The website needed to reflect the quality and professional look of the salon, so I took photos around the salon, inside and out, and used those images on the website. The new site features links so that users can email links to friends, and add any page to their online bookmarks. Take a look at the website at percapita.co.uk.

The brand new Per Capita website is now launched! About Per Capita

Ants Inya Pants

Ants Inya Pants is a children's play centre and they required a brand new website and a new domain name. The site was designed to be bright and fun, with each page of the website having a different bright colour scheme and different Ant Pose, and the tabs pop up as your mouse moves over them. Whilst the site is fun was made to still be fully accessible at the same time. The site was also labelled with a special standardised labelling system which tells parental control software, and kids search engines that the website's content is 100% safe for kids.

A hand drawn map features on the Website so that it is fun and easy to read. The site also benefits from an online party booking form, which customers can fill in on screen and the form will calculate costs and produce a form fit for printing. Pico Design also re-purchased an old domain name on the company's behalf that had been lost.

Newark Copper Cylinders

The Newark website has recently had a re-design, bringing the design of the site design more up to date and giving a cleaner, more simplified user experience. The website is similar in layout to the previous site, but the new design presents the same information with a new updated look. Initially also a website re-design - the original website needed an update, freshen up and along with that a website name. The design needed to be simple, and smart but also offer an air of familiarity to their original website for the company's existing customers.

The re-designed site offers an improved level of accessibility which includes a tool to enable the text size to be changed right from the website. This is provided to accommodate many of Newark's existing and new customers. As Newark Copper Cylinders is a long established family business, it also has a custom contact form that enables customers to send emails directly to the members of the Newark team. Visit the Newark Copper Cylinder website.

Cleaner Shade of Green

Cleaner Shade of Green design clean and green energy systems such as Photovoltaic electricity systems, pellet boiler and heating systems with incorporated underfloor heating and solar thermal systems for domestic and self build projects. Visit the website at csog.co.uk. csog.co.uk is designed so that it will expand to the width of whatever size screen is being used.

Because there could be a large amount of information about each type of product I designed the site so that it is really easy to navigate and because of the type of information, the site is simply laid out so it does not distract the user from reading the text. more information can be easily added to the different sections later on. Even whole new sections would be easy to add.

And of course, Pico Design

I design websites that are accessible so one of the main priorities was to make pico-dsgn.net extremely accessible. I needed a very smart site that would work in all types of browser, and at different screen sizes. As the content of the site is web design, which isn't everyone's cup of tea, I made the text on the site easy to read, short and to the point, and written in straight forward language.

I have designed in other features into the site, but you will not notice as they are there to make the site run seamlessly when using different browsers or screen sizes. For example, when the site is viewed on a smaller screen, the right hand side bar will disappear and the main text of the page will be allowed more room on the screen.