Things are Moving!

Any reader of this blog knows that I love web design. HTML, CSS, PHP, jQuery. Recently I've gotten really into mobile, and I'm trying to push myself with the actual graphic design part, though I'm still quite terrible in that aspect. Yet, what is the point in all this, besides it being fun?

I was approached by a good friend of mine a while back about starting a web design company, and turning my hobby into a part time job on the side. (A profitable one, since an average personal wordpress site goes for anywhere from $700 to $2000). Still, it's been slow going, weeks passing with really nothing happening. However, over the past week things have finally started moving.

The first surprisingly difficult hurdle was creating a name. Catchy, simple, and most importantly, not already taken. And if you think that there are lots of names out there not taken, try googling random stuff followed by the word design. We progressed through Blue Hat, to Blue Beard, to Cat Beard, and finally came up with out new name: CatStasche.

Picture, the face of a cat, with a prominent mustache.

That done, we registered the URL, www.catstachedesign.com, and I put up a coming soon page. Then work started on our actual site. It'll be powered by WordPress eventually, but right now we're working with static HTML and CSS just to get the layout working. One major aspect I'm putting a lot of effort into is responsive design, which is one of the few areas that I both A, understand well, and B, am getting in on the ground floor of.

I've decided on standardizing upon 4 widths, and making the design flexible within each of the four.

Mobile

0px - 600px

Smartphones, tablets in portrait mode

Narrow

600px - 1000px

Old monitors, and tablets in landscape mode

Normal

1000px - 1400px

Traditional 1024x768, and very common 1280x1024.

Wide

1400px - Infinity

Widescreen large monitors, normally 22" and above

Some sites have the region that I have as mobile split again, for phones in landscape vs portrait, but all my mobile designs are going to be 100% flexible, using no fixed-length values, so it'll scale, and make another split unnecessary. I've got the layout tentatively working for Wide and Normal, and will be working on the Narrow and Mobile versions over the next few days while my partner finishes the logo and starts working on the color scheme. Hopefully the site should be completely designed within the next week, so I can then spend the week after moving translating it to WordPress. And then we'll really be ready to rock.