I had a lot of fun building it and want to share my inspirations and design process. While thinking about a new design I wanted to maintain the 3D look of the old website. When I visited a design exhibition in Sydney I stumbled over the husque bowl.
I was impressed by its shape, strong lines and the simple color palette and decided to base my next design on a similar shape. The next step was finding a good color palette. I wanted to use natural colors so I looked at my New Zealand pictures for inspirations. This turned out very well and in the end all the colors on this site were extracted from this picture.
The backend has been greatly improved, too. The old site used tables for the layout which resulted in bloated html. The new design is based solely on div and css magic. The result is less html code, faster load and rendering times and improved maintainability. Furthermore the new design renders correctly on all important browser: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Something which I was never able to achieve with the old design.