Simon Hudson
Web Design & Development based in Leeds, West Yorkshire

Nucleus Human Change Technologies

Nucleus Human Change Technologies approached me to help them design and build the website arm of a new branding campaign they were launching.

The aim was to create a simple brochure site which would give an overview of the services they offer, as well as offering scope for expansion in the future. They were keen to make the site as clean and fresh looking as possible, incorporating imagery and branding which was being used on their printed literature. The site also included multi-media elements in the form of an audio clip from one of their relaxation CD’s and a video excerpt from one of their presentations.

Manheim Portugal

This was the first of seven websites launched to increase Manheim’s web presence across continental Europe.

Taking the lead on the project, I was not only solely responsible for the front-end design and build, but I was also required to liaise with colleagues in Portugal regarding content and management, as well as working very closely with the development team in the USA in order to integrate a custom built search facility into the site.

Custom CMS

As part of my experimentation with dynamic web development, I’ve begun working on a basic CMS using PHP/MySQL, mainly to learn the fundamentals and to see what’s possible.

The actual aesthetics of the site have so far been secondary to getting the structure and functionality right, and I’ve found myself adding bits to it as I’ve learnt more about how to work with and manipulate information from a database.

Whilst this is still very much a work-in-progress, some of the features include…

• Users are able to submit news articles (including images which are uploaded to a specific directory).
• User submitted articles are put in a "holding" area where they require approval before being added to the site.
• When a user submits an article, an email notification is sent to an admin email address to inform them a submission requires approval.
• Content is marked up dynamically, including paragraph tags, line breaks, links, link titles and image "Alt" attributes.
• Articles can be submitted to popular social networking sites (for example, Digg, Reddit and Facebook)
• Users are able to leave comments on articles (and again, a notification is sent to the admin email).
• Dynamic RSS feed

This site is currently just a playground for me to experiment with PHP/MySQL, but I feel it’s been (and continues to be) a great learning experience.

Miscellaneous concepts

This is a selection of concepts and ideas that I’ve worked up for various different projects. None of these designs actually went live, for one reason or another, but they were each projects in their own right that required planning, brainstorming, analysis and designing.

Jealous Records

Leeds based independent record label, Jealous Records were looking for a re-design of their old Flash based website.

After going through the existing content and functionality with them, it was decided to maintain the current structure and to simply update the look of the site. The content was migrated over from the old site and integrated into the new CSS based front-end.

UDSU Buxton

During my time working at the University of Derby Students’ Union I was responsible for the re-design of the website for the Union’s satellite campus in Buxton.

One of the major factors which had to be taken into account was ensuring the site was able to interact with the Union’s custom CMS, giving me my first real exposure to a dynamic website driven by PHP/MySQL.

UDSU Print Work

This is a small selection of printed projects I was involved with whilst working at the University of Derby Students’ Union.

Intrigue – End of Year Degree Show

This was a site built to accompany the end-of-year show for students of Commercial Photography, Video Production and New Media at the University of Derby.

I had to work closely with the various course leaders during the life cycle of the project, as well as liaising with the University's web team regarding hosting (the site has since been taken down from their server). The main challenge of this project was trying to find an efficient way of displaying the images, leading me to my first experiment with the Lightbox Javascript.

Douglas Todd

I had long been an admirer of Doug’s photography, so when he asked me to help him with a website, I jumped at the chance.

The design is simple and contrasting, allowing the photographs to become the focal point of the site. This was one of the first sites I did purely using CSS and as such, it was a tremendous learning experience for me.

Interactive iPod

This Flash project was undertaken as one of my modules whilst studying at the University of Derby.

The graphics were prepared in Photoshop and then imported into Flash, where I used Actionscript to control how each song is played. This was a very challenging piece of work as, at the time, I’d had only a small amount of exposure to Actionscript and as such, I found it a very difficult but rewarding project to work on.