So after a year of living and breathing the Manchester lifestyle – and its certainly been an experience – Kim and I are bidding farewell to these fair lands and heading back to New Zealand (and a NZ summer!).

Its been a very interesting year – the bitter cold of winter certainly suprised us, the large pints got us through, the castles were amazing, the buildings so full of history, the accents so varied, the art, the culture and most importantly some awesome friends have been made that certainly make it quite a sad farewell.

But next week we head off on a European adventure! Paris, Barcelona, Rome, Venice, Oslo, Iceland and London are on the itinerary – a very busy month awaits, can’t wait!

During my time at Cuckoo Design I coded the five template files we supplied them with – HTML,CSS and jQuery – for the new Police Mutual site that just went live.

The client set out that the templates needed to hit 100% compliance on the W3C validator for HTML4 Transitional. The internal web-development team for Police Mutual then took these and put them into the CMS they use, funnily enough it doesn’t pass the validator anymore.

Not the most exciting site, unless you’re in the Police in the UK – but technically theres some cool things going on in the site, check it out at www.policemutual.co.uk

So in the last week of work at Cuckoo Design in Manchester I put together a interactive presentation for a client that was built with HTML5/CSS3/jQuery. The premise of the project was to build a easily updatable presentation for sales people to use when talking with clients – on a laptop.

I proposed the project be built in HTML (on the premise that they use a modern browser) and simply go full-screen – or chromeless. This way we could easily send out updates via email and customising it would be super easy. The end result was some awesome HMTL5 parallax scrolling, a custom jQuery interactive map, fancy sliding panels and some nice CSS3 animations.

Heres a little vid of it almost completed, the content wasn’t ready before I finished so its all dummy text in there at the moment, but you get the idea at how it’ll work.

So after a couple of years of the old website its time for a change. The old site was based around a blog style layout that was supposed to simply flow work-in-progress posts with actual work and random posts – and after a while it just started to feel a bit messy combining everything. This all led to me not actually posting anything.

So here we are, new layout, new organisation. There is an actual work area and this, a separate blog. Will I post more regularly on this … who knows!?

Built in WordPress starting with the awesome Starkers Theme, it uses some cool little CSS3 tricks so you should really upgrade your browser if you don’t have a newish one. It should be super simple for me to keep up to date… but we’ll see how that goes.