Background Patterns & Textures for your website

I was thinking the other day, when creating a mock-up website for a client, wouldn't it be good if there was a resource to get background images for your webpages. Why this question hadn't occured to me before I don't know, but generally I make websites with quite a simple background - a gradiented gif or some such. I've always thought it best to have something small which can be repeated rather than try and make the client render a huge image.

Well needless to say, I quickly managed to find some great resources for background images. My top 3 are:

Brusheezy
Visit Website

Everyday Icons
Visit Website

Alice Grafixx
Visit Website

Check out the website I created for Lauren Hagger - an artist based in the Devon. For this website I used one of these free background images.

i-Pads, Shy-Pads

So, this week I was blessed with winning a website designing competition at my company, the prize - an iPad! Truth be told, from a company of nearly 2000 employees - there weren't a huge number of entries as not everyone had the technological know-how to create a website.

Even so, I'd still like to think my design, concept and it's user-friendliness got me to the top. From the knowledge I've picked up over the past year when building freelance websites for companies; I defnitely feel more confident at delivering high quality designs and interfaces that not only satisfies the client but more importantly I'm proud to make. Don't get me wrong though...I'm not arrogant in what I do, and I'm far from where I want to be as a web guru.

Anyway, we're going off topic - what I wanted to write about was this darn iPad. Many people have commented that for all the time I spend creating websites and working on software programming, I'm not the gadgety type - I just don't understand it! I'm happy to play with a gadget for an hour, but soon enough will get bored and if it's not useful I don't want it, odd it may be.

I had a play with the iPad last night; it's beautiful, sleek, clean, quick, clever....but what does it do?! So far, I've watched YouTube a lot, and played with Google Maps...just for the resizing and panning fun you can have with it. Now I'm at a loss....I recently got my holy grail Android phone which I can't leave alone as I can access the internet, email, facebook, AND phone people; the iPad just seems a bigger and more cumbersome version of this...without phoning (though to be honest, I'm not sure I'd want to make a phone call on it!)

Maybe some can enlighten me on what I'm missing, don't get me wrong - I like it, just don't know what to do with it!!

For the love of jQuery!

I've been developing websites for the past 8 years; both for big companies around the UK and US as well as smaller companies in Exeter, UK. There's nothing more exciting when creating websites than to get to grips with some really flashy UI's that will plug-and-play but also allow you to delve deep into the underlying code and modify it to your needs.

I appreciate jQuery has been around for over 4 years now, and I'm far too late to express this as a new-found technology that you must have - but it's still worth talking about as it's popularity and ease of use in my opinion is snowballing.

As a freelance website designer in Exeter, there's nothing better when brainstorming with new and existing clients than being able to show them something flashy, quickly and uncomplicated to give them that all important vision of where we can go with their website.

Generally I start with a standard jQuery plugin and as the functionality dictates I then take a look under the hood to customise it as required. Have a look at my portfolio page of websites; a number of which use customised jQuery plugins to create cool image galleries and UI's. Check out The Paper Florist's website to see how to customise the 'Simple Controls Image Gallery' to be combined with the jQuery Lightbox - simple yet surprisingly effective!

Why aren't I using this fantabulous technology already, I hear you ask!? Simple answer: I really don't know. It's lightweight, cross-browser compatible, powerful, UI rich and most of all: easy to bend to your needs.

So....next time you start messing around with images, navigation or anything clientside on a website, take a sneak at jQuery and code with a smile!

About me:

If you're interested, feel free to contact me about website design; or have a browse through my website and portfolio to see how jQuery's changed my life.