Thanks for such a great site Aaron! Thanks again for all your hard work on this. It's looking fantastic and I can't wait to see it up and live with all the new content.

PD Martin: Crime Author

About the Design

11 PSDs Designed
5 XHTML pages
1 CSS Style page
Optimized web-imgs
Valid W3C CSS
Valid W3C XHTML

view | case study | live site

The Project Briefing:

I need a new design for my website, that accentuates "PD Martin" as a brand and portrays a dark/mysterious design. My existing website was launched in 2005 and is in need of a new look. Since then, my books have been published overseas as well as in Australia and with book 4 due out in February I need a new menu system to accommodate the expanded works.

I would be described as an "emerging" author - i.e. unfortunately I'm not a best seller or making much money from it - but I know a strong brand and website is essential to communicate with my existing readers and hopefully build on sales over time. Based on other author websites, I think the design needs to focus more on my image than the book covers to create a look that doesn't date and to help readers get an impression of the author.



The Design

I designed a total of 11 PSD pages for this project. They are as follows:

  1. (1) Homepage - large banner
  2. (2) General content page
  3. (3) News/Events page
  4. (4) Blog page
  5. (5) Subscribe page
  6. (6) Photo gallery page
  7. (7) Video page
  8. (8) FAQs page
  9. (9) Books page
  10. (10) Around the World page
  11. (11) Full-width content page

The Code

In total, I hand-coded 7 pages (including the CSS) and validated them and tested them all across multiple platforms and browsers including Windows and Mac, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8. Here are the pages:

  1. (1) One CSS page to contain all the style
  2. (2) Five XHTML pages
  3.   a) Homepage XHTML
  4.   b) General Content page (with menu)
  5.   c) News & Events page
  6.   d) Video gallery page
  7.   e) FAQs page
  8.   f)+1 (BONUS). XHTML for the Full-Width General Content page
  9. (3) Web-optimized JPEGs for ALL images used on all previous 11 PSDs