Today I have finished working on a new website at www.bridgetfox.org.uk.

This is the personal website of Liberal Democrat politician Bridget Fox and the website is to be used in her campaign to be selected by party members as a candidate for the Greater London Authority list election in 2012.

This project involved setting up a new WordPress driven website, developing a new theme, adding a choice of plug-ins, before implementing the initial page structure and content.

I am pleased with how the theme development went. It enabled me to refine some techniques and design concepts. It also reminded me of the frustration that Internet Explorer does not yet properly implement drop shadows and rounded corners in CSS. Which spoils the impact for anyone looking at the site using IE. Although it doesn’t really have an impact on the look of the website this was also my first attempt to use HTML5 techniques in anger.

The starting point for the development was the Toolbox theme which helped give me a head start with the necessary PHP code. It works very well as a base template and I would recommend it  for anyone thinking of doing their own theme development.

The theme’s colour scheme is based on my Lib Dem colour palette with the addition of more variations of grey. Which is something I will look again at using when revising my other Lib Dem related websites.

The new theme, which has the very unsurprising working title of ‘Bridget’, needs some further refinement, after which I may consider making it more freely available.