Ann Jasper

Ann Jasper - homepage

Website: no longer online - view screenshots

Size: 3 templates, 5 pages

My professional status: independent web designer/developer

Website client: Ann Jasper

Dates: November 2010, with ongoing support after delivery

Categories: Client liaison, Project manager, IA & UX, Website designer, Front-end developer, Content-loader, Webmaster, CSS-based layout, jQuery/JavaScript, No CMS, Small sites

Brief: Ann Jasper was a friend of mine, and an artist who produced beautiful paintings for sale. Her husband Shelley is a graphic/website designer with whom I collaborate on WebWeaver Projects from time to time.

Shelley had designed a simple and stylish website for Annie, and it was my job to build the site, content-load it, and find an appealing way to display Annie's paintings in interactive galleries within the site.

Thanks Ali for all your fab work. Annie and I really like the News page and the way you've done the Gallery pages... This is brilliant. You've no idea what this means to both of us. You're a true friend.

Shelley Masters and Ann Jasper

My responsibilities included:

  • Refinement of the information architecture suggested by Shelley, including navigation and the addition of a news section
  • Ongoing liaison with Shelley and Annie in order to achieve all their aims for the site, and to work through a range of technical and implementation issues with them
  • Project management including the development of design/development timelines within a programme of work and ensuring that I achieved my project milestones in a timely fashion so that the website could go live in time for Annie's latest exhibition
  • Ongoing project management once I had built and content-loaded the website in response to client requests for alterations to the content
  • Extending Shelley's website design - including adding a navigation bar and splitting the original single template design into three slightly different templates - for the homepage, news page and individual exhibitions pages
  • Development of a set of 3 templates in CSS and HTML 4.01 Transitional, from which I built and content-loaded the 5-page website
  • Hand-coding in HTML 4.01 Transitional to a reasonable level of accessibility
  • Incorporating dynamic graphical effects using the jQuery plugin easySlider in order to display an interactive gallery of Annie's paintings on each exhibition page
  • Restyling easySlider so that the look & feel matched that of the rest of the website
  • Ensuring that the jQuery provided progressive enhancement while still allowing complete accessibility for those users with JavaScript disabled
  • Extensive testing of the site at all stages of the development process, ensuring complete consistency across the following browsers and platforms:
    • PC Windows7: IE8; Firefox 3.5, Chrome
    • PC WindowsXP: Internet Explorer IE6, IE7, IE8; Firefox 3.0, 3.5, Chrome
    • Mac OSX 10.6: Firefox 3.5, Safari
  • The development of a sitewide CSS print stylesheet - tested in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Chrome and Safari
  • Ensuring that every template and page had been validated using the W3C Markup Validation Service and that it conformed to HTML 4.01 Transitional requirements
  • Ongoing liaison with Shelley and Annie to ensure that the site was working as expected, and to provide additional HTML, CSS and content graphics as required
  • A final QA check of the website before go-live, ensuring that it was absolutely perfect, and then putting the site online and re-testing.

I was so happy to be able to work on this website with Shelley and to give Annie the web presence that she'd been hankering after for so long. Her paintings are beautiful and it was a real pleasure to be able to provide her with a way to display them to a wider audience, and to be able to publicise what turned out to be her last exhibition.

When Annie passed away in September 2011 I created a memorial page in WordPress to enable friends and family from around the world to leave messages in celebration of her life and creativity.

Media coverage

Open Studio - Ann Jasper: A sense of the theatrical

Kelburn artist Ann Jasper is joining the trend for pop-up shops with a pop-up exhibition in her Upland Road home next week.

Ann, who worked for many years as a costume and set designer in London's West End, will exhibit a selection of her recent works, mostly scenes of Venice, non-figurative boteh abstracts and paintings of harlequins. She says the common theme of her work is decorative history, a love of which she acquired during her many years working in the theatre.

The Big Idea, 18 November 2010