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Comparing Styles - INTMA vs WATMA
In INTMA I produced a very typically corporate styled website for a fictitous company, Richwoods Bloom Investment Advisors. This had a one column homepage...
...and the two column layout below everywhere else:
In short it was conventional in every way and, whilst well polished, was very conservative in it's design choices. It used a neutral colour swatch.
This time around, I wanted to push the boat out a little further by making a site that was a make belief tech/web design "how-to" site. That would justify me making a few more exciting calls in the layout and allow me to try some things I don't normally do.
So... What's New?
Well this time I've got a two columned home page to make the site look a little more action packed. To give that a bit of a web 2.0 theme I used a JavaScript call to write in my personal Twitter feed as well as a link to my personal homepage. I considered adding in some other content like:
- streaming in some ads from my OpenX server
- mashing up the RSS feed from my blog
In the end I left it simply because I felt the pages would look busy enough with just my Twitter feed and there aren't any extra points to be scored for incorporating dynamic content. Suffice to say you can probably visualise an appropriately busy sidebar.
The main header was an area that I spent a little ingenuity on. The red strip is made from a background image tiled on the body tag. This allows it to expand the full width of the page whilst the rest of the content sits in a wrapper div. Inside that div sits the header div and it has a transparent background which gives the illusion of curved corners. Like all in the CSS box model, it of course square.
| Specification | Whereabouts |
|---|---|
| Image in main content | Home page and above |
| Image in background | Red bar in header; curves in header |
| Colour scheme formally designed from a base colour | See swatch.html |
| List in the page content | See above |
| Last updated on auto link | Yeah I bent the rules a bit and put this on the header rather than the footer. This was because being a news/blog style site, people are used to seeing the dates of last publishing fairly prominently. It was therefore a concious design choice that seems appropriate in context |
| One email link and one external link | There are several external links on this site, including links to my INTMA site, to my personal site, to Twitter, to the contact form at my design agency and perhaps most importantly, here's a link to email bill.gates@microsoft.com if Internet Explorer renders anything wrong! |
| Consistent navigation | Global nav... check! Common links.... check! Local nav... check! We're all present. I'd make the Global nav into a fly out menu system if I were going to produce this site. |
| A table used for data | You're reading it! |
| Example liquid page | See swatch.html. Note that because I'm using CSS2.0 I can't use curved corners that newer SCBs understand from newer CSS implementations. The background picture on the header is therefore different as I've not time to rebuild the site with extra CSS handles to accomodate for little images. |
At this stage, since I'm not reusing code snippets, nor am I using templates, library items or behaviours, DreamWeaver is only slightly more useful than Notepad. In that I can see an approximation of how things look, it's useful and it's file and FTP management tools are a bonus, yet on just three bespoke pages, we're yet to see it's site management qualities at it's full. I tend to code my CSS by hand and in the aspect that it prompts and auto suggests, it saves some measure of time.
Incidentally, I'll note that I made this site using Fireworks 8 and DreamWeaver CS3. I first started using DreamWeaver when I began my career in web design, some time around 1999. At first I went through every version Macromedia produced but nowdays I'm finding that new releases aren't producing as significant a shift in efficiency so I'm only taking up every second upgrade. I've also shifted a lot of my site management away from DreamWeaver templates and onto Content Management Systems like Drupal, WordPress, OsCommerce and Magento. I still use DreamWeaver to do the visual look but it's not as major a tool for me as when I used to manage sites of hundreds of pages in it. I'm looking forwards to CS5 which I'm guestimating will be with us soon after the next version of Acrobat ships, probably after Easter.
