Back to Basics Web

The soft launch of a long term project went live on Saturday at Superfrock with much more yet to come. This has been a very close collaboration with the owners, delivering a look and feel to a very specific set of requirement.

The next steps will include many more features and updates, including a serious buffing to the ecommerce platform.

A big project like this offers a lot of opportunities - and I like nothing better than a challenge.

This week, I completed a basic two page site with a contact form/confirmation page. Basic HTML/CSS, customised from a free web template. The template will allow some expansion of the site to include additional material, as required. This work has been completed as a donation to the cause of the Friends of Abney Hall Park.

The key pieces of work for the site were preparing the header image - as this needed to be sliced to match the original template - and adding the FormMail to manage the requests for contact. Producing the confirmation page meant refining the template down to the base components (the template includes something like sixteen nested TABLEs, which needed to be deconstructed to work out the structure of the page) and translating that into the Perl script driving the FormMail. The contact form includes additional safety measures to attempt to minimise abuse from anyone seeking to hack the page.

I can imagine expansion of the site will likely include additional pages for a simple gallery (probably rendered with CSS) and more news/information. The existing template has room for plenty of additional links on different parts of the page, as required.

The handmade mannequin Milou demanded a simple site with an emphasis on imagery. To that end, the whole site consists of just three pages - two large images of the doll (based on the only high quality promotional images made available to me by the client) and a text only page containing all the written details from the other pages.

The doll evoked a bygone age and was painted in black/white, so the site took on the same palette, with only a touch of red - applied in PaintShop Pro at the time - to accent the lips, drawing attention to the head of the doll as the only spots of colour on the two pages (except for the red dot on the ‘i’ of Milou on the front, which mirrors the motif of the lips).

I based the copy off the information supplied by the client, with a darker grey background to make it easier to read the text. As mentioned, all text appears on a separate page, white text on dark grey with a black frame.

The site validates as CSS 2.1 and HTML 4.01 Transitional.

After far too long a hiatus, I have updated the back to basics web site. A blog format seemed appropriate, so a blog format I’ve created. WordPress has continually impressed me, so I’m sticking with it - and can recommend it for its flexibility, diversity and fine range of themes and plugins.

In the last week, I worked on a site for the charity South Manchester Wildlife Rescue. A pretty simple 5-page site, primarily images, with rollover navigation and content on the right. Nothing too fancy, which is ultimately what back to basics web has always been about, because you shouldn’t need to overload the senses of your visitor or the capabilities of the their browser to get your point across.

I wanted to keep the content as simple as possible, while using fairly neutral / natural colours. The client has approved the look and feel - so, I will continue to work with him to fill the site with content. As a charity, the site needs to communicate the purpose of the Wildlife Rescue, provide background information (here, a simple set of optimized .pdf files of press cuttings), detail the sort of donations wanted, and inform on what to do about injured animals. The pictures all feature animals at the rescue hospital or with the client - no images here have been acquired from stock art sites - to provide a genuine feel.

Work on this site has been completed as a donation to the charity - and I’ll continue to maintain and update the site gratis in respect of the excellent work done at the Rescue.

The site validates as CSS 2.1 and HTML 4.01 Transitional.

The Meeker Aviation website was an example of a very focused brief - as the client wanted to have a site that essentially looked exactly like the previous site.

To that end, the focus became to redesign the site to meet XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1 compliant requirements with reasonable backward compatibility with older browsers - like the earlier Netscape series. Otherwise, the site needed to maintain a very specific look and present all the content of the previous version of the site.

Effectively, the site benefited from the equivalent of a back to basics web oil change and tyre pressure check.

The original coding was stripped out and the format was maintained with compliant XHTML and styling. I made every effort to optimize the loading performance of the site. I optimized images and created proper thumbnailing (as opposed to inefficient HTML-forced re-sizing), with an effort to ensure that where possible pre-loading made sure high resolution images within the site would load before the client viewed those pages. I updated the content of the site throughout, to customer specification, offering different views on how best to do things without exerting any pressure.

The final site offers simple content and visuals - and the client now maintains it themselves.