I’ve just finished giving my website a long-overdue re-vamp.

The main purpose was to update the examples of my work which were looking very dated as I hadn’t added any new ones for about 3 years! I’m very fortunate to get almost all of my work by word-of-mouth, and so it has been easy to neglect the site, but it’s been nice to freshen it all up.

Despite the intention to just add a few new examples, one thing led to another and I ended up making a number of big changes to the appearance of the site.

Visually Rich

The most obvious change is that I’ve made all of the video players much bigger, and drastically reduced the amount of text. I am, after all, a motion graphics designer so it made sense to focus the site on motion graphics! I’ve also made the layout a bit less cramped which hopefully makes it feel cleaner and less cluttered.

There now are over 80 samples of my work on the site, and I will continue to add to this over the next few weeks.

HTML5 Video

I also updated the video player software on my site to a new version which supports HTML5 video. This is important as Adobe Flash which previously powered all of the videos on my site is rapidly being deprecated. The new player will use Flash if it’s available, but should gracefully fall back onto HTML5 video for devices and browsers without flash.

This meant producing every sample video in both MPEG4 and WEBM format in order that the videos could be played natively in all modern browsers (along with generating a still image to use as a thumbnail).

Navigation Simplified

I decided to get rid of the side menu, and put a new simplified menu at the top of the page. This freed up lots of extra space for making the videos bigger, and should make the site easier to navigate.

Shopping Cart

The shopping cart system has been modified to display a count of the number of items in your cart at the top of the page, and if you hover over this you can instantly view the contents of your cart (and remove items) without having to click through to the checkout page.

Facebook Video Previews

If you share a link for one of my shop products on Facebook, the video will now be embedded so people can watch it within Facebook.

Performance Improvements

The final task, which I will be working on this week, is to go through tweaking every aspect of the site for maximum performance. This should mean pages load slightly faster, making for a better user experience.

I hope you like the new design. If you have any feedback or would like to report a bug please get in touch – it will be much appreciated.