Insite Architects Web Site

In October 2006, I started to build a news web site for the Insite Architects, a architectural service group in Ivanhoe, Victorian.

Design Philosophy

The design of the Insite Architects web site was based on the company's letterhead design. Elements of the Mollio template by Pete Ottery, plus some other ideas I had seen and been mulling over, were adapted to produce the final template. The result is a new CSS based table-less template, meeting the requirements. Considerable efforts were also made to build in improved support for accessibility standards.

The Tools

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

• 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 Insite Architects 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.

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

Web Standards

The Insite Architects web site respects W3C standards. The web site is currently validated to XHTML 1.0 Transitional with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The web site 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 Insite Architects web site looks best on 800 x 600 or better resolution displays.

The Insite Architects web site went live late in April 2007.