Chapman Hill Web Site

From time-to-time I'd been helping my neighbours, Ross and Sarah Thomson solve some of their computer problems. One Saturday in August 2005 whilst at their place the conversation turned to marketing of their Chapman Hill Extra Virgin Olive Oil and web sites.

I started to tell them just how easy and cheap it was to setup and build the sort of web site they required, and there and then we signed up for a domain name and web hosting!

That night and the next day I quickly adapted the framework I'd been building for the Infopeople web site to suite the requirements of Chapman Hill.

Design Philosophy

As always, I wanted a clean and simple look that was easy to use and fast to load. And I wanted to continue to refine the navigation and page layout style I'd been evolving.

The Tools

The following software tools were used to build the Infopeople web site:

• Etomite CMS
  (running on a Linux platform using Apache, MySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer v6.0
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional

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

Platform

The Chapman Hill web site 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.

Several Etomite Snippets were created to generate various elements of the web pages, e.g. the page crumbs, various menus, page specific meta tags etc. Snippets were also used to generate pages from the documents database, e.g. site map, news listing etc.

The DHTML Menu used for the main top menu is licensed from Milonic.

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

Web Standards

The Chapman Hill web site respects W3C standards. The web site is currently validated to XHTML 1.0 Transitional with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Site Construction

I simply built a set of key graphic elements using Adobe PhotoShop CS. Then it was time to install the Etomite CMS, and start to adapt the Infopeople template and style sheets to suit.

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

The Results

The Chapman Hill web site looks best on 1024 x 768 or better resolution displays.

Best of all, I think the navigation system I devised works well.

The Chapman Hill web site went live in August 2005.