Australian Essential Service Group (AESG) Website

In October 2006, I started to build a new website for the Australian Essential Services Group (AESG), a property services group in Ivanhoe, Victorian.

Design Philosophy

The design of the AESG site uses the same elements as the Ominton website. The result is a table based template. Considerable efforts were also made to build in improved support for accessibility standards.

The Tools

The following software tools were used to build the AESG website:

• Etomite CMS
  (running on a Linux platform using Apache, MySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer v7.0
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional

• Adobe PhotoShop CS2
• Adobe ImageReady CS2
• Adobe Illustrator CS2
• WS_FTP for Windows
• HTML Tidy
• NoteTab Pro
• TopStyle Pro

Platform

The AESG website runs using the Etomite Content Management Systems, an open source solution released under the GNU license scheme. Etomite is a CMS solution built using the PHP scripting language with MySQL for the database.

A JavaScript and CSS based drop down menu is used for the main menu, the data for which is generated by an Etomite snippet. The secondary navigation menu is a simple list, generated by an Etomite snippet and styles with CSS.

The AESG website is hosted by JaguarPC on servers running the Linux operating system, using the Apache web server.

Web Standards

The AESG website respects W3C standards. The website is currently validated to XHTML 1.0 Transitional with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The website also conforms to a number of accessibility standards.

Site Construction

Various page elements were built and/or adapted to the colour scheme chosen using Adobe PhotoShop CS2.

Then it was time to write the content, and build the required web pages.

The Results

The AESG website looks best on 800 x 600 or better resolution displays.

The AESG website went live late in March 2007.