Michelle has been designing web sites since 1995. Her philosophy is to keep things simple within restraints, but to become as effective as possible within those restraints.

Although Michelle knows how to use many of the design tools like Front Page and Dream Weaver, she goes for a simpler tool called Home Site. While others gorge themselves on technological tricks that work only in certain browsers, Michelle keeps to the strandards, which means that the widest audience possible can see her pages.

Michelle benefited from being in the right place at the right time when she had access to a report commissioned by one of her clients. The report looked in to the browsing habits of people and showed Michelle how to design pages that actually win over the customer and do their job of aiding navigation and flow. She knows to avoid animations and white space, for example.

Her work in this field has also benefited from her formal project development skills, enabling the minimum of design changes throughout the design life cycle.

Michelle starts with existing literature, flyers, business cards, logos or anything which carries the existing client image. From here, she uses generic graphics programs to develop a, "look," for the site. The content of the site is also discussed, and a hierarchical map of the site is drawn up. Michelle uses Image Styler, Photoshop, Page Maker and a variety of other tools such as Web Graphics Optimiser, etc. to make sure her site performance is always stunning.

If the client does not have a logo, Michelle can create one herself. The, "Change," logo on the right is one of Michelle's creations, while the Angel Candles logo was taken from a rough line sketch which Michelle scanned and tuned, finally turning it in to the glowing angel. She also maintains a library of artwork and images from which a client can choose a, "feel," that matches their view of their product or service.

When the graphic design is finalised, Michelle then embarks on the process of coding the design. She codes a templete which will work in as many browser configurations as possible. She also codes the design to withstand certain amounts of stretching and compression, so that it performs well as at many resolutions as possible.

If the site demands special features like floaing menus or similar, Michelle undertakes that the Java Script code used will work in as many browser configurations as possible, before designing it in to the site. On issues such as these, Michelle already has experience of techniques that work across platforms, which saves her considerable development time.

Michelle is also aware of dissabled access to sites and tries to make her work as dissabled friendly as possible. Whereas these points were only recently starting to be discussed in public forums, Michelle has been working on dissabled web site access since 1999.

The last step is to merge the template with the content of the site to create the site itself. In some cases, elements of the site will be decided by programming languages, such as Perl or PHP. Data within some pages may also be extracted in real time from a live MySql database, or even flat files. This is also where Michelle's experience as a programmer stands her in good stead.