We make the most of your imagery
we design.all-sorts is a small, dynamic web-design consultancy near Wellington, New Zealand.
We pride ourselves in providing quality web development & ongoing support to our Australasian & international clients — for very reasonable prices.
Websites for Architects…
Image-rich websites.
How are we more suited to your project than our competitors?
We’re cost-effective!
Our solutions leverage the power of Open-Source software technologies, and we pass the resulting savings onto our clients.
We’re small, professional, efficient:
We’re a tightly-knit team of two: we can grapple with a complex task with focus and clarity.
We design and build it ourselves.
Many web agencies simply divvy up your project to a group of people, each hopefully bringing a particular skill to the table... not so with us.
One contact: your web-specialist is your
graphic-designer is your
interface-designer is your
programmer.
We understand the problem…
We understand how Architects and designers think, have a deep interest in Knowledge Management and Information Design, and have oodles of nous in the design and development of all things web.
Meet Gary
Meet Gary. He’s an Architect with a passion for functional design, enjoys making things, and has bucket-loads of experience.
His job is to:
- liase and collaborate with you on your project
- choreograph the site’s graphics and typography
- develop it’s information-architecture and structure
- write and meld all the XHTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and MySQL coding required by the design
Architecture website Architecture website Architecture design website design design design method method method function function function Modern Modern Modern modernism functional functional functional integrity bauhaus seidler critique aesthetics javascript CSS XHTML Textpattern mySQL jQuery Apple Macintosh Apple Macintosh Apple Macintosh Apple Macintosh geek lefty liberal standardsCompliant W3C blueprint 3d CAD video style stylesheet DOM QuickTime Safari InternetExplorer Firefox web internet browser standards interface UI GUI computers technology science productDesign graphicDesign practicality make build art sciFi building programming coding structure theory plywood economy efficiency drawing typography fonts pixel jpeg gif png noFlash create creative gumption tenacity sceptical Architecture Design methodology Function Architecture Design methodology Function Architecture Design methodology Function confident confident confident confident abstract knowledge appropriateness button link menu navigation structure structure structure
inquiring analytical thoughtful confident flexible playful creative strong intuitive humorous flavourful experienced charismatic tenacious sensitive confident confident confident confident confident
Meet Gary
Meet Gary. He’s an Architect with a passion for functional design, enjoys making things, and has bucket-loads of experience.
His job is to:
- liase and collaborate with you on your project
- choreograph the site’s graphics and typography
- develop it’s information-architecture and structure
- write and meld all the XHTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and MySQL coding required by the design
Meet Ingrid
Meet Ingrid. She conjures up many of our best ideas and handles much of our research, putting her degrees in Information Management, Social Science, Psychology and Arts (Majoring in Linguistics, English and German) to good use. She also helps-out with the pixel-pushing – lately all of her spare time and energy is dedicated to
Baguette, our irrepressible mutt.
Together Gary and Ingrid:
- design and formulate a design response to your brief
- prepare a ‘paper-prototype’ illustrated document to help you visualise and understand the design
- take your comments on-board and prepare a ‘working-prototype’ website for you to peruse
- finalise your site’s design and behaviour together with you and complete the build to your satisfaction
- provide support and advice into the future – we don’t cut-and-run.
all-sorts websites. never bitter. often sweet.
Content is the key.
When you get down to the nitty-gritty, websites have one primary function: to deliver content effectively. Our job is to ensure that the design and structure of your website meet this seemingly simple requirement.
The content needs to be indexed by web search-engines; the programming of the site and its Content Manager need to be machine-readable to facilitate this. Accordingly, we hand code our sites in standards-compliant, semantic HTML which (amongst other benefits) ensures that they are search-engine friendly. Our publishing tool of choice, Textpattern, is a mature, robust and flexible Open Source content manager: a web application designed to help overcome the hurdles of publishing online, and to simplify the production of well-structured, standards-compliant web pages.
Each design is formulated directly from your requirements — we won’t fob you off with a regurgitation of the latest fashion trend.
We enjoy this stuff too much to ever repeat a design: you can be confident that your website will be unique, designed for (and around) your message.
Experience counts in web development…
[jump in]
Take our elevator to the top…
or continue with our news…
News
31 Oct 10
Antarctica website gets a refresh
Graham Crist, Director of Melbourne’s Antarctica Architects asked us to give their existing website the twice-over.
06 Jun 10
Why is Adobe Flash so popular?
A message to all Architects:
Lose the Flash.
Flash is easy to develop for, particularly if you are a designer. Flash is pimped by many design schools as the saviour of the web – I suspect because it’s easier for lecturers and students to look good in front of faculty. This has resulted in a flood of Flash-savvy design students…
The fact is, coding a modern, javascript-enabled css-rich website is difficult.
It takes many years to master the intricacies of css, the language used to visually format the HTML of the webpage (which contains the content).
Flash-only websites are typically criticised for ‘breaking the web’ – encouraging bad interaction design, destroying the functionality of your browser’s back button, and making search engine indexing of the content imperfect at best.
Further, it has not scaled well to the burgeoning number of mobile devices accessing the web — if you are an iPhone / iPad user (or any other mobile platform), you’re out of luck. Savvy tech commentators, like my favourite morning read, John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, have long weighed-in on problems with Adobe’s Flash software:
“if you think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you can no longer build a Flash-dependent web site. (And if you don’t think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you’re probably wrong.)”
About 10 years ago I used Flash for nearly all our designs – but I ditched it for the newly emerging web standards approach of developing rich websites – I could no longer ignore those usability issues.
Flash is still useful in limited situations – like how we use it on our homepage which does not exclude mobile users from accessing the site.
01 May 10
We've just updated our website... now with costs.
Don’t you hate it when costs are not displayed on a website? I do. So we updated our website (the know-how bit) to display indicative costs for currently live websites.
We’re cheaper than you thought we’d be, huh?
12 Nov 09
Two more websites under our belt.
Its been hectic again – whilst we’ve been busy finalising a few ongoing projects (some projects take years to get out the door), we developed two new websites:
- David Haertsch Architect, Sydney
- Operandi Partners, Communication Consultants, London
28 May 09
Evo Engineering website
A website for a Wellington Engineering & Manufacturing shop.
Evo Engineering design and manufacture in-pit vehicle jacking systems (really nicely engineered).
A couple of months ago they asked us for a simple website to promote their product: we’re pleased to announce http://evoeng.co.nz