I have to hold my hands up – I am not a web designer. I have had no training, either in web or regular design. Also I am slightly colour blind. I apologize to all the people in that noble profession (design, not colour blindness) who will be tearing their hair out on reading the following.

For me, trying to build a website is like having a conversation with someone in a language that is foreign to both parties; the gist of what one is trying to say gets through but with very little refinement. 

So when Catheryn said that she wanted to replace the previous website’s incarnation (also designed by me) with something much more simple, it was music to my ears.

 Much of the inspiration for this design, the colours and fonts especially, was approximately stolen from a popular social networking site. Well, they seem to know what they’re doing and if we can make people comfortable with the familiar then perhaps they’ll stick around. Or even come back.

 The other bit of thievery came from technology that many regard as a threat to our industry (I’m not so sure about that) : the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. The innovation that has made these more commercially viable than previous models is ‘e-paper’. Rather than having a text on a white screen which, as anyone who works in an office will know, gets wearing on the eyes very quickly, they have come up with a electronic version of paper. As we have a lot of text on our website which we would like people to read without going blind, we felt that we needed something similar. So I started taking night classes in advanced electronics... no I didn’t. I took a picture of paper, ran it through a couple of photoshop filters and put it on our website. It took a few goes to get the contrast right and it is nowhere near as good as the e-readers but I think our text is now much easier to read than a simple white space might have been. If you have got to the end of this essay then you must agree a little bit.