Dave’s Gone Mental
The title of this site may seem to some as a statement of fact - it’s the personal website of Interconnect IT’s original founder. Originally the site was developed as Dave Coveney had the rather daft idea of entering into the Days of Thunder race series at the Rockingham oval.
But that idea, like so many, fell to the wayside once the costs were calculated in full. And I don’t know why I’m writing this in the third person as it’s written by me, Dave Coveney, anyway.
So, back to the story… a year or two pass, I had a blog that I’d been using to help inform family and friends about my travelling. I’d set it up using the WordPress system, which I found to be remarkably flexible and adaptable. It worked well, but the design of most of the free themes out there was basic and I wanted something that was a little different.
The design
The design wasn’t actually originally created for me personally, but was work we were doing to create a standardised site platform for motorsport clubs who would like a magazine format website.
We took the design inspiration not, as is often the case, from other websites but instead turned to the printed magazine world. In particular we found the layout and look of CAR magazine to be interesting. We used that as inspiration for the entry page. Everything else then just came naturally, with James Whitehead, Interconnect IT’s web guru, doing most of the hard work on the design and coding front.
It was quite a challenge too - the site is full of subtle transparency effects, and used some ideas that hadn’t really been seen before. As a consequence there was no code to root around for ideas. Everything was new and interesting.
Using graduated images that fade to solid colours allowed us to make boxes into which large images could be inserted as backgrounds within category and postings without spoiling the site’s look and feel. As a consequence the overall look was strong and dramatic. This theme is now in use, with some modification, at Longton & District Motor Club’s website, and will soon be making an appearance with Liverpool Motor Club. Other clubs are now also expressing an interest. The content is built by them, and we set up the overall look and feel, so the owners of these sites are responsible, ultimately, for the quality and navigation.
The biggest site to use this theme, so far, has been my own - Dave’s Gone Mental - and it’s a successful site by the standard of most personal blogs, attracting around 6,000 distinct visitors a month. A large part of that success is the site’s high ranking on search engines, as well as having been linked for a particularly gruesome moment that I had involving a mosquito and a parasites.
Implementation
The site worked well, and drew praise from many sources. Traffic at times has been tremendous, not least because of our successfully registering a domain name used in a Catherine Tate show. We were surprised to get it, but the page created for that show has had many thousands of visitors and hundreds of comments made - mostly positive, albeit often badly spelt by the largely teenage fans. Even when terribly busy on the night the url was mentioned (we reserved the domain long before the show was aired) the site stood up well to the thousands of hits in a short space of time.
Summary and Interconnect IT’s opinion
We decided to design the site with 1024 width screens, as we believe that for this style of site a lot of screen area gives the maximum impact. This is an increasingly common design decision. However, we wouldn’t recommend it for all sites, and it does rather depend on the target audience for a website. Mostly we design with 800 wide browser windows in mind.
When the template is redesigned we will remove some of the transparency elements used. Although they give a subtle and attractive look to a website, the processor load is high and can make scrolling a little clumsy on computers more than about five years old, especially slower machines.
The design of the category view layout could be improved in order to improve ease of navigation and to make it more clear what is and is not an article.
Overall though we’re very pleased with the design and it’s been a big success for us. We’re looking forward to working in this distinctive style in the future and selling it to more of our customers.
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