Infopeople Web Site

During the third quarter of 2005, I began to work on the design for a new version of the Infopeople web site. Infopeople is the IT recruitment division of the ITR Group.

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.

A major goal was to select and use a content management system which would enable Infopeople staff across the country to maintain the web site themselves. After seeking feedback from others, plus considering and evaluating a number of popular choices, I settled on Etomite CMS.

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

Site Construction

I chose to again use the DHTML Menu from Milonic (www.milonic.com).

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 build a new web page template. Then TopStyle Pro was used to build a cascading style sheet.

It took me some time to get acquainted with some of the concepts of Etomite. But in no time at all I was happily adapting snippets to my needs, or writing new ones.

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

Most impressive is the way Etomite can be used to generate dynamic page content.

The Results

The Infopeople 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 new Infopeople web site went live in early September 2005.