Steve-J 2011  /  Oct 2011

The 2011 version of this site had a few major changes, the first was the design. I changed the template from the fairly basic one used on the previous site to a new one from Themeforest. The other big change was that the back-end was changed to be powered by the Noisegate Media CMS.

The template I chose needed a fair bit of customisation as it was a single page template (i.e. it had all the sections on a single page and just scrolled down the the relevant part when a link was clicked). I'm not a big fan of single page templates especially when some pages (such as blog articles) would need to be on their own page. So I decided to change it to a multi-page site.

The Noisegate CMS is a custom built PHP powered Content Management System, as I'd done a lot of work on the CMS I decided to use it for my own site. There was a bit of development needed to plug the site in, but once it was done adding and updating content on the site was quick and easy.

Features:

• Slideshow - JavaScript image slideshow on homepage
• Image Gallery - with categories and lightboxed Images and Quicksand category reordering animation
• Portfolio - Using JQuery so page doesn't need to reload between items
• Blog - Using JQuery to have paginated slider without page reload when scrolling
• Noisegate CMS Integration - Backend Content Management System allowing easy updating of site
• Contact - with a form which emailed queries to me so I don't need to publish my email address
• Twitter Feed - Automatically displaying my latest tweets