Hi all... just thought I would share with you my latest large site.

It's been 5 weeks solid of my life, I've had the pleasure of being able to work with a large Melbourne ad agency who directed much of the content and some of the design.

Main components are >
Joomla core
JomSocial
No Number plugins.

Happy to answer any questions as to how I did certain bibs n bobs

Hope you like.www.giantrealriders.com.au

As a keen cyclist, thanks for the link! Good looking site too!
As a tyro Joomla developer, can I presume its not template based?
Could you outline the production process with the agency? ie original design in Photoshop etc. or whatever..?
Thanks

If by "presume it's not template based" you mean an off the shelf commercial template, then yes.
However all Joomla sites are template based. The means by which you come to that template are varied.

All sites I build are always a custom template. I am however now using Zen Grid Framework from Joomla Bamboo, which is a starting point for all templates that includes the underlying structure ready for me to modify and skin.

Most of my designs start their life as at PSD, however this one is not a particularly complex design and is in fact in line with the clients (Giant) world wide web style. So essentially I was just recreating their existing design with a few "tweaks" thrown in.

Thanks for that, have you ever used Fireworks for concept development rather than PS?

Yes I have. However virtually all agencies/designers I deal with use PS, therefore there's no point using anything else.

Fair enough, PS rules!
Thanks for the encouraging info, on my bike now to do the chores!