Which is nice.

There's only one Carlos Tevez

Creative Review has a blog entry about the design of Kate Moss's brand after her modelling agency realised the importance of Ms Moss having a brand of her own. Designed by Peter Saville.

Visit Kate Moss's Topshop site

It's been a busy week of development all around, with several projects on the go for me. Also out on world wide netweb I see Ben has been at the glue and developed a rather nifty site very much in the spirit of Web 2.0 using online collaboration and shared services. I on the other hand am still trying to get webstandardsdesign.co.uk done, I'm going the progressive enhancement route (read: lazy), but it's all moving a bit slow at the moment. Probably because there's no direct money in it. Cheapskate. I also launched the new Twizzle Parties website last month, it's ongoing with regards to the design as most of the work so far has been put into installing and configuring the QnE CMS, the accessible content management system from the Guild of Accessible Web Designers, so more to come on that sometime soon...

We've sold our house in Surrey and are feverishly looking for somewhere to squeeze the Brady Bunch in Hertfordshire. Hopefully we'll move soon. To a barn. A large one. In a field.

I've also set up a new company - Web Standards Design Ltd (website to follow when people stop paying me to do real work), and have kicked off life on my own with a handful of great clients. It's all rather exciting, if a little busy, but at least it keeps me away from impregnating the good lady wife.

And, I'm off skiing for the first time in years in March.

Happy New Year everyone...

I passed the Foundation, as you find that out on the day, but I won't find out about the Practitioner result for 6-8 weeks. Fingers crossed, as the Practitioner was pretty tough going.

On the work front, I'm contracting for the next few weeks back in the lovely, sunny Bracknell. Good job though, and very busy.

Also this week, I put Google Analytics into my pages, on both this site and brownsmith.net so I can track the visitors to both sites. The added bonus of that is being able to monitor the uptake of IE7 users, which appears to be as quick as has been fortold. Worth noting is my most recently developed sites, including this one, appear to be error free in IE7 which I am rather happy about.

Another highlight this week is seeing Topshop.com finally launch. There are a few beers to be had tomorrow night to celebrate. Which is nice.

The contact form is here, so go ahead, give it a try.

Firstly I've been working on the layout and design on the site, and I now have something that I am really quite happy with. I've resurrected the green palette of the previous version, which I quite liked and given it a whole new look and feel. Along with the colours, I've created a new banner image for the site, as well as fixed up some typography problems and I am using Verdana for the bulk of the text, with uppercase titles.

I also implemented Paul Sowden's Alternate Stylesheet Switcher, and along with a high contrast CSS stylesheet (change back to normal stylesheet) for accessibility purposes. I quite like it too.

I have one or two things yet to tidy up, but hopefully they are not show-stoppers.

I've been very busy migrating all the content over to MovableType 3.2 in the last few weeks and here it is. I've been contemplating when to launch and ideally I would have liked the design finalised and the content finished. But with the previous incarnation I enjoyed tweaking the live site and seeing the changes, so I have launched a skeleton site with every intention of changing everything. I need the site available more than I need a design at the moment.

As for the design, I threw together the Apple-esque reflection logo but I will not be using this. There are several ideas I have for the design and hopefully I will settle on something soon. The content is also a little out of date in places, but I have integrated some rather nice MovableType plugins to help with the content on the site. I'll save that for a post of its own, or include it in the About section.

In other news I am still working hard for Arcadia Group creating the suite of ecommerce, promotional and corporate websites using accessible and standards based code. We're a little way through, with a couple launched (see portfolio) and the others are in varying states of completion depending on their launch dates.

I'm just two weeks away from a well earned holiday in France with friends and my family, which I am very much looking forward to as I have had only 2 days off this year and to be honest I am feeling the strain just a bit!!

So, please be patient with the site, it could be a few weeks from having a satisfactory design, and certainly a while until it is error free, it is currently full of bugs. I started with a wireframe/layout design, and now I have written the layout CSS I'm gradually filling the site with content. Lastly, when all the content is in and the links work I'll lay a design over the top, but until then it'll stay in a vanilla form.

I'll no doubt post more on the site design as time goes on.