Amazingly I've been keeping an electronic journal or presence in one form or another since 1994, and I've been keeping a web site for almost twelve years which I think makes me an relatively early adopter. I reckon that this must be at least the ninth version of the web site if you take into account all of the various domains and designs it's had over the years; true some designs were better than others, but I'll blame the bad ones on little fits of creative madness, this one though I'm pleased with and it replaces the homage to ab-fab which was starting to feel a bit tired, so I thought it was time to rustle up something a little more 2007.
In the twelve years or so that I've been keeping a site I've accrued an enormous amount of content dumping brain to keyboard like some cheap, but it must be said effective, form of therapy and over the 12 years what started as a simple site about me has developed a blog, a picture journal, stories, work stuff, details about nights out and enough other random drivel to fill several backup CDs if nothing else! This is the first site that's ever attempted to merge it all together into one cohesive web site though, so for me this is rather exhilarating.
All my previous designs have invariably ended up with pet names, a little like my cars, but If I'm honest I haven't yet thought of a name for this design which replaces (in order from right to left above) ab fab, blue, fat and skinny, so for now I think I'll just have to be refer to it as 'grown up', which is a reasonably approriate name I think, if a tad dry.
People often ask about the tools that I use to create the site and it's content, presumably when they're looking to start there own site, and I'm always the first to admit that what I use might be considered as running the gamut, which is a combination of: my Apple Mac Pro and my 12inch PowerBook G4 which both run Mac OS X loaded with Adobe PhotoShop CS, Dreamweaver, Apple's Final Cut Pro, Safari, CyberDuck, Pages, and a few others. For Photography I switch between traditional and digital depending on the task at hand; as a result I'm never far from either my FujiFilm S5500 or my ever trusty Pentax MZ30 SLR which has, to name but a few; a Sigma 28-80 lens, a surprisingly robust Pentax 200-80 lens as well as it's standard 35mm lens which all benefit from a UV filter as standard to make life easier when out and about.
There's also an espresso machine, a copy of iTunes loaded with millions of songs, all pumped out through a set of brilliantly responsive JBL creature's and as well as all of this there are biscuits, cake and of course the ever winsome Dave; without whom there simply wouldn't be a site as he's been instrumental in helping me learn the dark arts of cascading style sheet, as well as loading it all into the aftershock* content management system which looks after the backend.
The site is fully XMHTL 1.1 Strict compliant throughout as well as having relatively compliant CSS and meeting WGCA accessiblitiy rules where approriate.