Extreme Bansko is a UK based company providing quality holiday packages in Bansko, Bulgaria. Andy Lawson, CEO of Extreme Bansko required a new site to promote their skiing apartments in Bansko.They offer an alternative to Bansko hotels, and are an excellent choice for a cheap ski holiday

Several challenges awaited including integrating the booking system into the new site. As with many sites, imagery was a major part of the site and Andy provided some superb photos of the Bansko resort. If you’re looking for Bansko Holidays, or Skiing in Bulgaria take a look at the site.

Apologies, I know, i know, it’s been a few weeks since my last entry. I’ve been on holiday in the great English countryside and had to get back into the swing of things…

It’s important for a freelancer to have some time (either weekly or monthly) to get up to speed with new technologies and learn new skills. It’s something I haven’t done for a while, but for a few months now I’ve been hearing about jQuery especially from the Boagworld podcast. I’ve managed to get a few spare hours to read up and try some basic effects out, and I think I can say it will change the way I think about website creation from now on. The fact that its so lightweight is a bonus, but there are so many fantastic effects which are relatively easy to get going, and require just simple coding skills.

If you’re a web designer and have some spare time, it’s definitely worth getting your hands dirty. It could be the wow factor you’ve been looking for…

I’ve just finished the brand new Legacy XS site. New features added since the last update include a gallery, video content and forums section.

Design wise, initially there was some trouble with ie6 not displaying floated divs as they should be, but overall, not too many problems to speak of (I must be learning!)

I wanted to bring the XS site up to date, and needed to integrate some new features. Forum integration was relatively painless; phpbb makes things pretty simple. Another main addition is the video content which is run from our server, rather than youtube/myspace or wherever. For some reason Dreamweaver’s additional Flash code makes the site not validate, but hey ho.

Also added in a new gallery with upload feature. The uploads get screened by me, just in case anything not appropriate gets posted.

That’s about it really. As I said, relatively quick and painless process this time. Check out my other sites at www.faciodesign.co.uk/web_design.html

Rebranding of the Facio Design website has been completed, so take a look. A lot of time was taken to make sure it was W3C compliant, both XHTML and CSS. I’m quite happy with the amount of colour involved, although I may add some gradients on the background to make it a little more interesting.

Drop me a comment and let me know what you think. Work continues on my other personal sites, including www.firstandgoalnews.com

Right, this is the first post on my blog, so lets make it a good one.

As this blog is being launched in conjunction with my new freelance design site, Facio Design, I’m going to concentrate on how this was created and eventually coded.

The inspiration for the site came initially from my creative influences which are predominantly nature orientated. My newly designed logo was also influential and for continuity the typography is used throughout the site.

Using png’s a lot, I almost always have to use conditional comments to get everything to work in ie6, but this time i used a conditional comment to load an alternate stylesheet:

<!–[if lt IE 7]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”your-stylesheet-for-ie6.css” />
<![endif]–>

People who still use ie6 now get a site which looks good, but if they had ie7 or better still Firefox, would ook just that little bit prettier, and whilst I’m on the subject… Please, everyone, if you haven’t got Firefox, get it here:

It’s free and so much better and safer than Internet Explorer and you can get excellent add-ons too