That is going to be cool!  I love the mouse over on the about me.   It made me smile!

Thanks. I'm going to add in some jquery to make the images fade, which will look so much better. I'm also going to do a white background version of the design/style switcher (if you use a web developer add on for your browser, just use it to turn off the body background and you'll see why I'm going to do it). The great thing about doing the mouseover is that the puppet actually does those movements, which conveys a much better idea of how the puppets work on the net - without using Youtube videos. Much fun!

This is very much an experiment, I've been inspired by some of the web design portfolio sites I've seen, and I'm literally creating the design as I go. I have no idea how I'm going to implement it on the other pages just yet, but I think this is a much better design than what I've got currently.

The benefit is that I can display my work without necessarily making it look like a shopping cart. The aim is to make it more 'gallery' than 'shopping'. I think this will make it more likely that people will be interested in buying something, and also lifts the site more into 'professional' 'art' rather than just 'hobby' 'craft'.

It's really been useful for me to do the UNIMA Aus site, and more recently - especially - the School of Puppetry site, because I have a much better idea of what I'm doing wrong, and what to do that will work in my favour. The previous two designs on Puppets in Melbourne had been developed out of need, adding bits here and there. This time around, I'm making conscious choices of what to add and what to leave out. So my designs are getting much more focused.

I think I'm getting to a point now where I can actually say I can design. Before I could say 'I can hack'.

... Anyway, glad you like the beginnings! There's still heaps to add to that page, so I'm either going to wreck it, or it's going to look very very cool

That page really looks neat, Na. I like the mouseover on the "about me" as well. I'm only a hacker, Joomla, and from what Shawn said about Concrete5, I'm trying that. I just get frustrated that most CMS sites look like CMS sites, and I'm not near competent to overcome that. Anyway, it really looks nice. The UNIMA Australia site as well.

Thanks Chris!

UNIMA Aus uses Joomla, and I have vowed that from now on I will never ever ever use it again. It's such a shanty-town bunch of code, I'm always frightened that it will break any day now. (Break = hacked?)

I agree that the CMS sites tend to look same-ish. I think it's probably a) the amount of people who use it who aren't designers, and b) the fact that they come with free templates which tend to be tweaked rather than redesigned. (Incidentally, www.opshoptoursaustralia.com, a site I manage, uses a tweaked version of my current PIM website template, which itself is tweaked from a free template. The new version of PIM, which I just linked above, is an even more tweaked version...)

The good thing about CMS though is that for novices like us, you can get your hands dirty without having to reinvent the wheel. The more I break stuff on my site, the more I learn!

Na,
What is PIM?  Is it program like Joomla or Concrete5 that is a CMS?  One thing I like about Concrete5 is it was pretty easy to make look like it was not a CMS.   Billies new site uses the Concrete5 BTW.

Sorry, shorthand for Puppets in Melbourne. It gets tiring typing it repetitively