Raspberry Moose Website

This project is born the moment I ask my partner, "shall I use something like Wix or Squarespace to make my website?", and he replies "no you should get an agent to help you build it"! So yet again I find myself taking on a coding project that just wouldn't have been possible for me a year ago. I'm excited to be here, but it's also a bit daunting.

Raspberry Moose first came about when I spent a few months many years ago learning HTML and CSS. In the end I didn't get very far with it, though I did do just enough to enable me to complete a few projects at the time. My main sticking point was the coding side of things, and the level of attention to detail you have to have with it, but I did enjoy making websites. On the back of this, I voluntarily chose to rebrand the company I was working for at the time, and I set up a nice new modern-looking website (with help from Squarespace) to replace the early-2000s-vibe one they had when I joined.

I didn't keep Raspberry Moose going for very long, but we held onto the domain name in case I might want to use it again. So when I came to the end of my course this year, it felt like the time to resurrect it, to brand it properly, and to create a website.

I find it hard (again) to come up with a good logo and colour palette, though this time I do at least have more confidence in my design abilities. Having enjoyed coming up with characters for my personal identity, I think it would be fun to do something similar here. I start playing around with ideas for situations in which our moose might find himself, and what other items he might want to interact with.

With help from my partner and AI, I download VS Code and work out how to use the agent within it. They talk me through where the static pages will live on my machine and how to save content for inclusion on the website. I take a photo of my first sketch of a homepage, and upload it to the agent.

The first design it comes up with is very basic and not at all web-ready. However, it does it incredibly quickly and it's impressive! Plus it's much easier having asked it to do something based on a photo, than it would have been if I'd described every element in turn. It's not good, but it's a great place to start.

Creating a website from scratch is very much a work in progress. I go from just a one colour page with some text on it, to building out other pages for the site, and starting to add images, typefaces and colours. I try to remember the same rules that I am using with the apps - make it simple, make it look nice, and make it work well. It's very much still a work in progress, but I'm happy to be able to share it with others now too.