When I lent my services to a collegue who was working on a film about 12 years ago, I was introduced to the world of cnc. I remember watching this huge machining centre milling out a slab of mdf and turning it into a fantastic set of gears. I knew that it would have taken me hours to achieve the same thing with traditional power tools. I decided then that I would invest in a cnc router for my own business Oxenham Design. At that time I could turn on a computer, but even to check email seemed like a crazy set of operations. I persevered and learned every piece of relevant software I could get my hands on. I am now fortunate enough to be using Vectric's ASPIRE software, and Techno cnc routers, which has helped us to create some amazing projects, both in part, or in full. I thought that this blog would be a great place to share "behind the scenes" adventures with the software, materials and equipment we use, as well as the projects we build.

Thursday 5 May 2011

Finally, a new website is concieved




The other major player in my time has been working our new website. Yeah I know, 'What a geek!' -'only nerds build there own sites!'- 'get a real job you bum'- Oh wait,  the last one was my mother in-law. I don't really mind the look of our current site, but I have no idea how to maintain it! The guys who did it years ago have all moved on to other things, and this left me kind of stuck. I have had an offer from a friend who does this for a living, but as I didn't really know what I wanted, I didn't think it would be fair to dump that on him. I can hear myself now "Yeah, it looks good, but can you change it all to this maybe?" So I decided I would do it all myself. I know nothing about website design (or at least I didn't until Sunday) but there is lots of software out there, and I pretty much closed my eyes and picked one. A little bit out of the norm for me, as I like to research and compare, but website building is out of the norm for me as well. I kind of thought 'ultimately, how hard can it be?' I do have a lot of software experience under my belt, and I understand design and layout. I decided I wanted something creative,  fun, and a little unexpected. It really doesn't say much when a creative company has a boring site that isn't maintained or updated. I really have enjoyed working on the death machine. And with all it's rivets and rust, it started to give me an idea for what I wanted our website to be. So I started designing all the artwork for it, as well as all the little roll-over icons, etc. Well I can see why building a website can quickly become very costly, there's a lot of checking, page linking, layout changes and the "OH-NO, I didn't design an icon for the gallery page!"
 But I hung in there, and now have a pretty comprehensive understanding of  how this all works. I still have a ways to go on it, but I'll get there. Hopefully I can launch this weekend. It will be a sigh of relief to cut the line and let this website free!



JO

2 comments:

  1. Thanks! Not being a pro web guy, it was a HUGE job in terms of time consumption.

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