Lee Munroe » gallery

Redesigning WebDesignire – a showcase of Irish web design

Lee — Sat, 14 May 2011 17:13:50 +0000

I just relaunched WebDesignire. WebDesignire is a website showcasing “beautiful web design from Ireland and Northern Ireland”. It’s a side project that I initially launched in 2009 but due to lack of time I haven’t been able to update it in quite some time. The new site is built with Ruby on Rails, and much of the original functionality has been stripped to keep it simple.

Why it needed re-designed and re-developed

The old site

The original site was built using WordPress. WordPress is a fantastic framework but it was far too bloated for a project like this. 99% of the WordPress functionality wasn’t needed.

Maintenance and keeping the site updated was also an issue. For every website that was submitted I would have to do several tasks including taking screenshots, saving screenshots, uploading screenshots etc.

Lots to do there, hence the reason I had no time to update it.

The new site

Using Rails I was able to develop a minimal web app that only included the functionality that it actually needed – submitting and approving websites.

Using the very cool Bluga.net webthumb API, the web app is able to automatically take, resize and save screenshots of the websites.

Approving and publishing a site now literally takes one click.

Experimental for me

As with any side project I was able to experiment and learn a few new things.

For this project I was able to try out:

Am loving the combination of Sass and Compass for writing CSS. Will follow up with a more detailed post on this soon.

How useful are ‘CSS galleries’?

Galleries like this have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Of course they don’t represent all the great sites that are out there and they certainly don’t take into account user experience or what’s below the surface of the iceberg. It’s a visual snapshot of a bunch of websites that form a good first impression.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em I still think it’s interesting and useful to see who’s delivering quality websites locally.

Do you know any cracking Irish websites?

Submit them to WebDesignire. Even better if it’s not one of your own sites ;-)

Looking for clean, well structured websites with a good mix of type, colour, shape, texture and whitespace etc. HTML5 and CSS3 use is a bonus.

Site launch: Web Designire

Lee — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:14:29 +0000

Irish Web Design Gallery

My latest mini-project is a web design gallery for websites and designers from Ireland and Northern Ireland – www.webdesignire.com.

I use galleries all the time and they’re great for getting a daily dose of inspiration and as a web designer they’re a great way to help promote your website.

Why another gallery?

There are 100s of galleries online, CSS Mania, Best Web Gallery, CSS Drive to name a few, but there isn’t a niche gallery for Ireland.

The aim for Web Designire is to:

Help to promote Irish websites
Showcase the best designs coming out of Ireland and Northern Ireland to the rest of the world
Provide inspiration for other web designers

Visit Web Designire and if you’re from Ireland or Northern Ireland remember to suggest any sites you’ve designed. If not, feel free to vote on the sites showcased.

30 Creative Twitter Theme Backgrounds

Lee — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:31:44 +0000

One thing I love about Twitter is it’s simplicity. The concept is simple, the usage is simple and even the design is simple. As far as your theme is concerned you are restricted to changing a few colours and adding a background, keeping things nice and clean and ensuring the app doesn’t become a mess like MySpace did :)

These restrictions limit our creativity boundaries so if you want to make an impression with your Twitter profile it all comes down to the background.

I’ve compiled a list of Twitter profiles who have impressive creative backgrounds, which I feel stand out above the rest. Feel free to share any you’ve come across and you can also follow me on Twitter.