Monday, January 24, 2011

The gazcook.com website fiasco

Around 12 months ago I was awarded a £3,000 innovation voucher from the Northwest Regional Development Agency.

The idea of the voucher is to help creative businesses develop by spending their voucher with organisations and institutions signed up to the program.

My voucher was awarded for the design and development of an online image management system. Or, as I understood it, a website where I could sell images and deliver images securely to clients.

I chose a Manchester-based company to carry out the work. Several months and a dozen appalling templates later, I put in a complaint against them and the website never got completed. I lost the chance to spend the voucher.

There were several areas where I felt they had fallen short. Here are some of the designs they came up with:

Direction_1
Direction_3
Having had only a shell of a website online for over two years I have decided to rebuild and finish off my website myself.

Earlier this month I did a one-week training course on Adobe Dreamweaver with Academy Class (Ian Gilbert did the teaching and was excellent) and partially funded by Vision+Media.

I’m halfway through the design of the all new gazcook.com

The website retains the same front page, though I have rebuilt it from scratch, with every other page brand new, including the projects page I have invested extra attention to. It's coming soon.

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