UK Web Design

ICUS has ceased trading - the site is now a design example only

At present all of the design aspects are dealt with by our sister site Elmhurst Design.

We can provide top quality web sites using stunning custom made graphics, flash animation, forms which send enquiry details to your e-mail address and much more...

For further information please see Elmhurst Design's graphics and flash pages.

Design Decisions

This section will look a some websites that have been created and explain some of the thought and design considerations that go into making a successful website.

Case 1 - Gaveston Hall

We were given a brochure with virtually all the information we required and the website was based largely around this.

The hall itself is surrounded by woodland, so we thought a running theme throughout the site would be a woodland and trees.

With regard to the background colour for the pages, we wanted to create a warm welcoming feeling, so went for a creamy yellow.

Original woodland photo - this was converted to a repeating image.		A mask was added to fade the woodland image into the background and then a cutout of the logo was added.
The tree border was added to main photograph of Gaveston Hall on the homepage so that the theme carried through the whole site.		We filled the Gaveston Hall logo with the woodland image and added a cutout box to highlight the logo.

The navigation is through eight simple mouseover buttons (with a transparent background) at the top of each page.

Once the general look and feel of the site had been completed. the remainder of the site was quite straightforward. Most of the photos and information were already available in the form of a brochure. These were scanned and tidied up and text added.

We inserted links and photographs to local places of interest, and added a simple form.

We also converted a black and white map of the grounds into a colour flash movie with mouseover areas.

Case 2 - Icus Web Solutions

Icus began life as IKON web design, however there are already a number of design companies including the word ikon. We had to look for a snappy short name that was available as a co.uk domain name. I was playing around with an anagram program (puzzlex in case you are interested!) and came across a few interesting combination including icus.

We chose icus because it could be a mnemonic (Internet Creations Unique Solutions) or could be used as a catchphrase - I SEE US...

I don't know why, but the name sounded Roman to me, so I immediately thought of marble baths and based the first draft of the site around this. The 'i see us' also got the creative juices flowing, and made me think of the Stargate movie and the Egyptian god Ra. I managed to find a picture of the Egyptian eye symbol and merged an editted version with the marble.

The whole border of the site was originally all brown marble, but looked somewhat bland. Thoughts went back to the Roman baths and I produced some watery graphics to contrast the brown marble. Let us know if you think it all works together!!!