The first site completed—completed just in time for their Halloween party—was for the Lower Red Lion, a pub and guest house in St Albans.

It has 400 years of history behind it, with some visible timber and brickwork, and featured in the ITV series Foyle’s War.

My aim was to make the site as useful as possible to people thinking of visiting St Albans, and to showcase all the pub’s attractions.

I am now working extensively with typographic grids, creating pages which balance vertically as well as horizontally. This site was my first complete site to use such a grid. It was also my first HTML 5 site.

The site which I designed and developed for the theatre group Footlights Calpe is also an HTML 5 site. A bit simpler than the Lower Red Lion site, it still allowed me a few theatrical effects.

For a few more details about the two sites, you can glance through the Website notes and Design notes which accompany each display on my portfolio page.

It’s such a cliché. And yet, still true. If you want it good and fast, you have to pay. Over the odds.

Most of my clients have limited budgets. They get me cheap, and I produce at least halfway decent Web sites. Check for yourself.

I lift my glass to all my fellow professional Web designers who charge little, produce great Web sites—and whose clients keep wanting to see the Web site up tomorrow…

I am really proud of this Web site. I spent a lot of time researching and thinking through the basic issues: what pages there should be, what should be on each page, and how we could make visiting the site an enjoyable and informative experience for a range of distinct kinds of visitor. In particular, I wanted every page to answer the questions: are these people worth booking? and (for singers) is this a group I would enjoy being a member of?

On the visual side, I began—as in my design for the Football Prophets site—with the idea that I wouldn’t frame the content, even though I stuck to my own 960px ‘rule.’ I experimented with a new style for top-of-the-page navigation, plus (on the home page) a really inviting visual jump menu. For more detailed design notes, you can check out my Web design portfolio. You can also visit the Costa Barber Web site itself.

In order to put a proposal to “Tom de Selby”—as he wants to be known—I did a bit of research into tipster Web sites. I was staggered to discover how many of them there were, and how many of them specialised in betting on football matches.

I very much hope that “Tom” is successful in this crowded market. I have never met him, and never even knew what he looked like until last month—when I did a bit of sustained detective work and tracked him down to someone else’s Facebook page. But it was obvious from his many emails that he is a really nice guy.

You can visit the Web site itself: it is called Football Prophets. You can also read my design notes on my Web design portfolio.

That’s because it was a property site, and the owner sold her property. I am now using the same Web domain name to promote another property, on sale by one of my near neighbours in Calpe.

I actually had this new Web site up at the end of August, but I have been really busy with work for clients, including a football tips Web site in the UK. I have at last found the time to add this Calpe villa Web site to my Web design portfolio.

I am really quite pleased with it. The property Web site genre is only too predictable. Here in Spain at least, estate agents are happy with really dull Web sites based on templates, or try to jazz them up with time-wasting animations such as videos or slide-shows which the visitor can’t control or even stop. This Web site puts the visitor firmly in the driving seat. It is as interactive as a property Web site can be.

Don’t take my word for it. You can have a look for yourself.

Unfortunately, I can’t show you either—unless you are an AFPO Calpe member, in which case you can head over to the site and log in! I suppose that means a few more people will see those pages than see my lovely designs for the Jalón Villa Rentals management interface, which only the owner and I ever see. (Actually, I could add the index page to my page designs—so you can see if it’s as lovely as I claim. I’ll put that on my to-do list.)

What anyone can see are the public pages. They are quite text-heavy, so I compensated by setting text in plenty of whitespace—actually buff—and creating what I hope is an imposing header.

This header is in part based on the AFPO magazine cover: it was from there that I got the blue and the yellow, and the overlapping titles. At the end is an image of the Peñon, with a cloud halo. I love the photo, which featured on the previous AFPO site, and still appears on their stationery. I’m not so sure about the heavy gilt lettering—but the President told me he didn’t have a copy of the photo without the lettering, and I’ve now got quite used to it.

Because of the big header, I gave the Web site a left-column menu.

I explain the background to this commission, and the thinking behind particular design decisions, in my notes on my website portfolio page. And you can of course visit the AFPO Web site itself!

Belated, because I have been so busy that I have neglected this blog. However, I now have a couple of posts on hand which I should complete in the next week: one on moving a Web site based on a proprietary CMS (that’s been my most time-consuming job) and one inviting comments on (another) new Web site.

Watch this space!

Have a look for yourself!

In spite of that, new people keep subscribing to this blog.

I haven’t by any means stopped mourning Paul. I think of him every day, and often dream of him at night. But I can’t go on ignoring people who find my stuff useful.

My plan now is to start a new series—of ‘Web rules.’ I can think of about 40 or 50 offhand. I’ll explain all in my next post, which will also include Rule 1.

Early last week my brother Paul, who had stayed with me over Christmas, just before I wrote my last post, died suddenly in Madrid. I will be saying a bit more about this, and about my lovely brother, on my personal site.

In the meantime, there is still much to read, if you are a recent arrival to this blog. There are dozens of tips for designers and developers who are starting out on the Web, some discussions for established professionals, and some up-to-date posts on life on the Costa Blanca. Just click on the categories on the right to browse through the archives.

I hope to take up posting again quite soon.