Welcome world,

After a good few days of Photoshop goodness and alot of movies in the background I have finally got a finished design I am happy with, of which you can see below and click on to see the the live test page.

I tried various design elements and whilst I wanted to involve ‘ice’ elements they did not really work with the colour scheme, which I wanted to keep as it is warming and received good feedback. So I concentrated on the floral elements and worked with those to bring the site together.

My observations of adding the design after the layout and base colours is that I can see that there are certain areas that would gain from designing earlier on in the process as I found myself restricted from how I coded it and some ideas would of required alot of going back over covered ground. The main part being the banner, where I wanted design to flow from banner to content area to bring it together, I found myself having to spend alot of time getting elements to line up and recoding DIVs  to lose borders so I could get the backgrounds to run to the edges. If I had a better idea of the final look before I did the colours and secondary layout then I would of been more economical with the images used and improved loading time of the site. Admittedly in these days of broadband it is not so much of an issue but old habits die hard and it’s a good attitude to have when building websites.

Essentially the design was restricted by the layout, which is just as bad as restricting content and layout to the design. So I would recommend doing a basic layout, not adding borders or padding whilst you come up before you do the designing in Photoshop.

I am still very happy with the final results, the build process as a whole and look forward to seeing the final website in all it’s glory. So now for wordpress template and the other pages.

Till the next posting, remember smoking milk can seriously damage your saucepans.

Read Part 4 – Base Colours