Expert People Web Site
On Friday, 26th March 1999, I arrived home from the office at 8 p.m. and
began work on a web site for Expert People, an IT
recruitment agency we had recently established. On the
following Monday the resulting web site went live.
Design Philosophy
I decided to adopt a very clean and simple style for the
site. It had to be easy to use and informative for the two
types of visitors we were targeting:
- Candidates looking for permanent or contract
positions; and
- Companies looking for a recruiting agency to meet
their needs.
Although most IT recruitment sites go for a
"technology" look and feel, I decided that
emphasising that recruitment is about people would be more
appropriate. Thus I decided to incorporate an image of a
person or people on all main pages.
To complicate matters I decided to adopt a 1950s/1960s
"retro" look for the people images. The thinking
was that this would stand out from the "trendy",
"arty" or "business" looks that are so
common. And besides we could later have a bit of fun with it
on both the web site and in company literature and branding.
(Though I must admit the initial implementation was a bit
more "corny" than I intended. It does need a bit
of a makeover.)
The Tools
The following software tools were used to design and
build the Expert People web site:
- Microsoft FrontPage 98
- Microsoft Internet Explorer v4.01
- Microsoft Word for Windows 97
- Microsoft Windows 98 and Plus!
- Adobe PhotoShop for Windows v4
- Adobe ImageReady v1
- Adobe ImageStyler v1
- CorelDRAW! v5
- WS_FTP for Windows
The site was hosted by
WebCentral on a Microsoft Internet
platform using Windows NT Server and Internet Information
Server with FrontPage Extensions.
Site Construction
Having just received Adobe ImageStyler and ImageReady
that week, I decided to try and make use of them. Thus the
main navigation buttons on the left hand side of the pages
were created in ImageStyler.
Adobe Photoshop was used to create and/or manipulate the
required images. Running them through ImageReady so as to
optimise the file sizes was well worth it. ImageReady was
especially useful when working on the animated GIFs.
By midday Sunday I had the site structure, page framework
navigation elements, and most graphic elements in place
within Microsoft FrontPage 98. I then proceeded to write the
content as all 25 pages were created.
When the site went live on the morning of Monday 29th
March 1999, almost everything was in place. (That was one
long, long weekend!)
By the end of that week I'd been able to collaborate with
the team at Jobnet and we had the contract and permanent
position listing pages being generated by a Perl CGI script
from the database Expert People maintained on Jobnet. No
point in having to maintain it in two places.
The Results
Well as I write this in January 2000, the Expert People
web site is still running with almost every page still as I
left it at the end of that memorable weekend in March 1999.
And on the whole, it's doing the job it was designed to do
quite well.
Last modified:
Tuesday, 30 October 2007
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