The main purpose of this site is to serve as a resource for English teachers around the world, which they can visit to find lesson plans and photocopiable student worksheets. As a former EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher, I had a large collection of handouts and lesson plans that I had accumulated over the years.

Constructing a website and making some of these worksheets available to other teachers seemed a great idea for my first published website. But it was also quite a major challenge to convert over fifty worksheets into HTML so that they would print nicely.

Unsure, of what equipment other teachers might be using in their varied locations presented the extra technical challenge of making the site user-friendly for the widest possible range of browsers and operating systems.

The lives of teachers are often very stressful so I chose the green and grey colour scheme to try to create a restful ambiance for the tensed-up teachers arriving there. These are also the colours of (modern) blackboards and whiteboards so I hoped to establish a subliminal sense of familiarity.

During its first three months of operation, I have had hundreds of visitors from as far a field as New York, Japan, and Taiwan. I have also received a number of e-mails related to the site.

I constructed this site as an assessment exercise for the Visual Software Training home study web design course that I completed in August 2001, while still living in Japan. The company described in the site is not a real company but was invented by me for the purposes of the course.

Having chosen the company name "Biodiversity" I decided to reinforce their brand identity by the use of multicoloured butterflies and a leafy repeating background both of which I produced with "Photoshop". I also designed covers for books and CDs on sale through the company's "Destinations" page.

As it was never designed to be actually placed on the internet, some of the original images had very large file sizes. The version you can see here has been slightly adapted for internet use. Nonetheless, some of the pages may take a while to download.

I was awarded the highest possible grade (Distinction) for this site and, in particular, the assessor praised the logos, and other images which were all produced by myself.

This is an online catalogue site I have built for a popular and well-known pet shop with branches in Tunbridge Wells and Tonbridge, UK.

The aim of the site is to present a selection of the company's most interesting products on-line. It also aims to encourage customers to use the home delivery service being offered by Wolfit. For this reason, it is important that clear photographs of all the products are available on the site but at the same time the pages themselves still need to download reasonably fast.

I photographed most of the products myself with a digital camera and a few other product images were suppied by the manufacturers, which I then altered to make match the other shots. I also designed all the pawprints and cartoon animals, which the site owner had expressly asked for.

I was glad I had done some extra study in Java Script as I was able to put it to good use making the pop-up windows that expand all the images on the site and also when fixing a few troublesome features that appeared differently in Netscape and Interent Explorer browsers.

I spent a good deal of time trying to come up with a navigation system that would be easy and fast to use but would also blend in well with the look and feel of the site. Both the paw-print navigator and the navigation bar at the top of each page went through many alterations before we were finally satisfied.

More sites will be added shortly!