Ethan’s Update: Learning Web Design, Graphic Design and Videography

On the first day, I first gathered websites and designs that appealled to me as reference material. I planned my own website brief based around the concept of Lighting for major events and festivals. I completed the initial drafts using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. I have some exerience with these programs that really helped me to make a strong start in this business. By the end of the day I had a final design for my website. We used this final design to theme a WordPress website. WordPress is very popular and user-friendly platform that is being used by many businesses who prefer being able to edit their own websites after it has been built by Drive By Websites Ltd. I later wrote and published ‘Services’, ‘About me’, ‘Training’, ‘Contact’ and ‘Blog’ to populate the website.

My next task was to continue to create features of the site such as the slider. I used the Smart Slider 3 platform as this is very flexible for design. During the last few days, I had been gradually learning some CSS. I can now use the ‘Inspect Element’ tool available in browsers to find, test and change design code. CSS can be worrying and difficult at first but working with the basics made it a lot easier to understand.

As the website was coming together, we started working on our next big project of the week, a video trailer. Drive By Websites Ltd have been producing video content for clients since late 2021 and it is quickly becoming a core service. This was going to introduce me to my using Adobe Premiere Pro and a lot of stock directories. In the end I made good use of the best Stock Images, Stock Videos and Stock Music I could gather. I am really pleased with this video and it came out better than I had first expected, but can still do with some tweaking here and there.