I recently finished working on a project for Qwerty Design, a website redesign for Whiteghyll Visual Fabrications Limited. Richard Dale over at Qwerty designed it and I produced the CSS, markup and added a little bit of WordPress magic.

It's not immediately apparent, but there's some really clever code behind the scenes, even if I do say so myself. WordPress is not strictly a CMS, it's an exceptional blogging platform with some CMS-like functionality built in. Whiteghyll.net is not a weblog… you can probably see where this is going. What I have found is that WordPress can be a pretty good CMS if you, ahem, tweak it a little. I'm sure you'll agree, this doesn't look like a regular WordPress-based site does it?

We built Whiteghyll.net to XHTML-strict level and we worked bloody hard to make it as cross-platform as possible. It even renders passably well in that old chestnut, IE6 (and I've a few more grey hairs that act as testament to some of the difficulties we encountered there).

Working with Richard Dale was an absolute blast, although his attention to even the smallest detail did frustrate me at times. But it's that level of love and care that makes him such a good designer. With Richard, there's no such thing as "good enough" — it's got to be perfect, or he won't let go.

Also worth praise are Alexandra and Holly from Whiteghyll. If there is such a thing as the perfect client, Alexandra and Holly probably fit the specifications. They knew exactly what they wanted from their website and they went out of their way to assist us during the development phase. Most importantly, they really care about Whitegyll.net and they have an awesome vision for its future.

This has been a project that I have really enjoyed working on. It was fun collaborating with Richard, Alexandra and Holly and the project threw up enough technical challenges to keep my interest level high.

If only they could all be like this! Check it out…