Derek Van Derven Web Development

My name is Derek Van Derven, I am a freelance website designer/developer from New Jersey. My inspiration for websites comes from painting and photoshop effects. I like websites that have great graphical appeal to them, and beauty of color, that roughly match the type of paintings that I like to create. Painting has a strong influence on my websites as I like to incorporate various background textures often in my sites.

As I do more websites, I am starting to learn to be subtle in my application of graphics on a site. The idea of "less is more" on a website is true. Probably more true for web design than for painting, as a website has text content that is the main focus, not true for a painting for beauty's sake. So web design requires a designer to design the page around the text content and make that the main focus, and make the art aspect of the page secondary. This is a tough balance sometimes, and is something I strive to balance every time I make a site. I am drawn to gradients done in photoshop for my sites as they provide a soft and elegant look to the site, without too much distraction. I have been staying away from confusing background patterns lately as they tend to attract the eye too much.

I have an equal love of the power of web services technology as I do painting. PHP is the main language I use for the websites I create. It is powerful in making incredible database driven websites as businesses.

-Derek