Website Design

The online magazine Culturedarm, bringing together a diversity of culture from popular music and contemporary politics to Golden Age Hollywood film and nineteenth-century Russian literature, and the light-humour websites Tepid Take and The Shimmering Ostrich, each utilise template customisation alongside substantial custom CSS elements. Together, template customisation and the addition of elements using custom CSS, HTML, and JavaScript enable the three sites to remain vibrant, unique, and endlessly changeable while maintaining a certain formal consistency appropriate to three brands falling under the same umbrella.

At Culturedarm, full-width images, image sliders, drop caps, alternate headers, and carefully chosen fonts complement a focus on long-form articles, with longer cultural, political, and historical pieces and short stories adopting a column format evocative of old-fashioned broadsheets. Image sliders are programmed to display up-to-date Instagram feeds, while full-width video posts create the effect of a movie screen via your computer or tablet. Culturedarm also boasts the full integration of a web store, selling printed T-shirts, embroidered caps, magazines, and other merchandise, based on the Shopify e-commerce platform.

Homepages at Culturedarm, The Shimmering Ostrich, and Tepid take feature custom sliders and post feeds, and parallax scrolling incorprating video as well as static images. Characterful, declarative headers, easy-to-navigate menus, and fully widgetised footers complete the effect. At The Shimmering Ostrich, music posts include a colourful review metric. All of the sites are customised using CSS, from the insertion of layered backgrounds and image borders to closely attuned sidebars, banners, and post widths, and they contain the space for advertising code. I have also designed a website for Rufforth Tennis Club, a local tennis club in York, England, based on a native WordPress template.