Paul Hopkins

As a current member of Glebe Symphonic Winds I designed the website for them. This is the second version of the Glebe site I have designed, the original was basic and required photos as part of the main design.

When I set about redesigning the site I wanted to remove the need for large photos, I created the design but decided the site required a logo as a finishing touch. I was lucky enough to get a professional designer to design one for me and I think it looks great. Check out The Design Frontier if you require any design work done.

I have used WordPress as a base for the website and created a custom theme (as I have done with this blog). This allows me to create the site fairly quickly andit gives me huge flexibility if I wished to add anything in the future. Although I have used some plugins I have done as much as possible without.

http://gsw.hopinet.co.uk

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The Uttoxeter Town Brass Band was developed at the same time as the Glebe Symphonic Winds website. It was based on a lot of the work I did for the GSW site. Underneath the different appearance it is basically the same site, mainly because both groups wanted similar functions it seemed crazy to start from scratch.

The great thing with using WordPress and created themes is you can make two very similar sites look very different (This is true any time you use CSS). I was given a free reign on the site appearance. I used the colour green as this is the band colour and tried to create a clean, simple site that is easy to navigate.

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Quintessential brass is a small brass group I occasionally play in, we wanted a basic web presence so I created this site. A fairly basic site this one, it is a static site so I didn’t bother to create an admin area, the small changes I will make to the site in the future I will update in the old fashioned way. Although a simple site in terms of code I’m prettly pleased with the look of it.

http://brassfive.hopinet.co.uk

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Due to the timing of when I was asked to design this site I used the existing design I did for Hilton Primary School as a starting point for the Kibworth Band website (hence, the similarities in appearance). My brother was a Kibworth player when I was asked to design the site back in 2006

The site was hand coded and so my brother could maintain the site easily without having any web development skills I set up a basic site administration area for him. I no longer have any control over the site as my brother has left the band, but it is still in use and looks OK.

A quick note on the information below, if you now try and validate the site it has errors both in CSS and XHTML, this is due to alterations people have made to my code. Originally it was vaild both CSS and XHTML 1.1.

http://www.kibworthband.co.uk

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The first major site I designed was for John Port School Band, it was a very basic design but from the very beginning I wanted to design standard compliant sites. I played in John Port School Band during my time there and decided to create a website for old members so that they could stay in touch more easily and keep up to date with the latest information about the band.

I originally designed the site using iframes, but as soon as I started to discover the wonders of CSS I quickly set about redesigned the site using CSS. Considering this was my first ever website I am still pretty proud of it, yes the look of it isn’t quite as good as my more recent websites but still I don’t think it’s too bad for a first attempt.

http://www.hopinet.co.uk/jpsb

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