The Redesign

Sun, 18 October, 2009

Creative Happy has come along way since the launch about 6months ago. I've worked with some great clients and some really talented people.

For the last 5 month I have been working within a company and have been doing all work generated by Creative Happy on my weekends and evenings whilst working fulltime. I've now decided to leave my full time job and focus fulltime on moving Creative Happy forward and really letting people know who and what Creative Happy is.

The Re-design

For the last 6 months Creative Happy has been my portfolio website where I could showcase my work and a place for future clients to get in touch with me. Although the current design was great at the time, the web continues to move forward and so do I. I felt it was time for a Re-design and start focusing on the future and where I wanted to take Creative Happy. The new design and site will focus more on Creative Happy as a business rather than my portfolio as it's not just me anymore.

The Site

The new design has been designed in the browser and I didn't create any mock-ups as I normally do. I've been reading a lot about creating the site within the browser and thought I would give it ago and see what all the rave was about. After spending 3-4 days planning and working around my current freelance work and my fulltime job I had my spec for the new site. After 2 more days of reading through the spec in my head, changing and removing bits I didn't need or didn't feel needed to be in the spec I had a finished version.

I then needed to decide weather I was going to use Wordpress or if I would move the site to Expression Engine as Expression Engine was more scalable and I could really build on top of the platform. I decide to download Expression Engine core and install after about 2 hours of messing with the core version I really fell in love with how the system worked and decided Expression Engine would be my platform of choice. First step I took after choosing my platform and completing my spec was to create the design and templates, this I found was really simple as I could add and remove bits I didn't feel looked right or didn't work. After I was happy with all my template pages it was time to do some reading about Expression Engine. I spent 2 nights reading the Expression Engine docs and running through the forums.

I was now at the stage where I was ready to port the templates over into Expression Engine and start to get the site functioning. Another 4-5 days went by and I had ported all templates over and had all the dynamic areas working with the test data. Once I was happy with how the site was working and functioning I was done, all that was left was the content and porting some bits from the first version.

Creative Happy People

When I first started out Creative Happy was just me, but over the last 6 months I have acrued a fair bit of work and it's been a right task trying to manage myself and answer all the e-mails I get daily while working full time so I have built a small team of designers/developers that work with me on all kinds of projects. I also have Becky Vaughan who will be managing each project now, giving me more time to focus on development of clients projects. Becky deals with all the clients, such as quoting and invoicing, but her main role is ensuring that every project runs smoothly and the work continues to flow.

Thanks to anyone who helped Creative Happy grow over last 6 months lets hope the next 6 months are even better.