I made heavy use of golds, oranges and yel­lows in this design, with reds as accent col­ors. Prob­a­bly the only non-offensive color in the whole mess is the blue text. It’s some­thing to behold. His cur­rent wife­said, “It’s pretty!” when she saw it. What­ever you say, sweety…

The GIMP has sev­eral things going for it. First, there’s the price. I don’t care who you are, but com­ing up with a bet­ter price than free is a tough sell (except that you intend to pay me to use your soft­ware). Sec­ond, I’m a big fan of mul­ti­ple mon­i­tors so the GIMP model of not hav­ing a stage sur­rounded by tools is great. I use four mon­i­tors in sort of a cock­pit (or com­mand cen­ter, as my friend Mike says) con­fig­u­ra­tion. I put the tools box on one side of the image, the lay­ers / paths box on the other and then I have this huge image area to work with. With Pho­to­shop, I’d have to stretch the stage across sev­eral mon­i­tors, and that’s just hard to manage.

This site was a cus­tom job where I pretty much had the run of the show on design. It was fea­tures they were after. Once again, this is Word­Press (seems like it’s been a while since I’ve done one that isn’t), and uses a “mag­a­zine style” theme. The slider box is a cus­tom job (based on contentslider.js) that pulls from four pre­de­ter­mined cat­e­gories. We got a lit­tle mem­ber­ship (con­ti­nu­ity) soft­ware in there, some SMS text mes­sag­ing and a wicked auto-responder / mail­ing list manager.

The plan is to turn this site into a knowl­edge­base for equine / pet busi­ness arti­cles. I’ll keep devel­op­ing it and adding fea­tures, but the design is pretty much fixed by the cus­tomer. It was made to order, col­ors, graph­ics and fonts.

Unfor­tu­nately, there is no gov­ern­ing body for licens­ing or cer­ti­fy­ing design­ers. There is no spe­cific set of courses one must com­plete or set of books one must read to make a busi­ness out of design. As a result, the first time some­one fig­ures out how easy it is to make a site with a WYSIWYG edi­tor (like Front­page or some other equally evil mon­stros­ity), they hang out the shin­gle as a “designer” and wait for the busi­ness to pour in.

These days, there are hun­dreds of solu­tions to that prob­lem, but in the inter­est of time I’m only going to talk about my favorites.