sp.a is the socialist party of Flanders (the north, Dutch speaking part of Belgium).
i-merge was asked to redesign the entire website, including provincial and municipal subdivisions, and design and develop a blogging platform. The site is customisable for regional and thematic news.
My role was to make an initial design for the website and blogging platform and to develop the CSS and HTML framework as a basis for the rest of the pages.
The website is build using a CSS layout, including some nifty tricks and hacks to make it all cross browser compatible.
During the years I’ve made a lot of newsletters for all kinds of clients like Rabobank, Berlitz, Tiense Suiker, NIVEA, RaboDirect, Volvo, etc.
The mails vary in purpose too: monthly newsletters (segmented or not), single blast mails, mails for external parties, mails controlled by content management systems, …
In development, newsletters are quite different than websites. The variety of mail clients and their way of handling the HTML obliges to use table layouts, a minimum of inline CSS and backup methods to make sure the content is displayed correctly.
The mail systems I have experience in are i-merge’s own proprietary one, Optizen’s Messagent and simpler versions like Infacta’s Groupmail.
Lowdown is a skateshop in Louvain (where I live), ran by friends of mine. I made a few initial designs for their new website. Eventually they picked another one, but this one was my personal favourite.
They specialise in skate parts and clothing, but during the winter they also sell snowboards. Plans are being made to sell surfing equipment during the summer, and this distinction had to be clear in the design.
You probably know Stella Artois as the most important brand of one of the biggest breweries in the world, InBev.
For the Belgian market i-merge had to redesign and rethink the concept of the site. The main focus is music, with a music calendar, a forum, quizzes and sweepstakes to win cds and other goodies.
Given a new but challenging design, I got the task of creating the first key pages on which my colleagues and I could rely for future development. The website is built up entirely using CSS and here too some tricks were used to match the particularities of the design.
Whilst being the key figure between the designers and programmers, I kept an eye on the overall (HTML and CSS) development to ensure consistency. Regular status meetings and enough communication and feedback made this a successful and very satisfying project!
The city of Ghent needed a younger looking, more appealing and user friendly event calendar. I designed the lot and developed it, one last time in table layout.
The content is retrieved from a bigger Flemish “Cultural Database”, making this a very technical project. Good communication between the programmer and myself was therefore essential.
The usability was greatly improved with a personal calendar, clear navigation and search functions and a intuitive layout using icons and sortable columns.
