Omniton Web Site

During the second quarter of 2004, Tim Norton, CEO of Omniton asked me to do the branding and marketing material for his strategic business advice company. First, I designed the company logo and stationary. Then it was time for a web site and email newsletter design.

Design Philosophy

As always, I wanted a clean and simple look that was easy to use and fast to load. A major goal was to make site navigation easier, by implementing some ideas I had been thinking about over the previous year.

I was growing increasingly annoyed by the way most web sites put all of the main navigation elements in a left hand side column. On most web pages you scroll up and down within a page using the right hand side slider bar, but then have to track across to the left side of the screen to navigation from page to page. Also when you go to print out the page content, often you get the navigation elements in their entirety, with the right side of the main content chopped off.

I came up with a design where the legacy navigation elements, i.e. simple HTML links, were done as breadcrumbs, section lists and sub-section lists in the far right side column near the page slider. But I also added a DHTML-based  menu that enabled every page of the web site to be reached in the page header. And as if that wasn't enough, another set of HTML links to the major sections was placed in the page footer.

The main content was placed where you start reading, prominently in the left side column. Related material such as links within the page, and links to related elements of the web site are place in the first right side column.

The Tools

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

• Microsoft FrontPage 2003, to build the pages and cascading style sheet
• Microsoft Internet Explorer v6.0
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional

• Adobe PhotoShop 7.0
• Adobe ImageReady v3
• Adobe Illustrator 10
• WS_FTP for Windows
• HTML Tidy
• NoteTab Light

Site Construction

I chose to use the DHTML Menu from Milonic (www.milonic.com). Using a Dynamic HTML and JavaScript based menu, would enable the site pages to load faster, and be more search engine friendly.

I simply built a set of key graphic elements using Adobe PhotoShop. Then it was time to fire up Microsoft FrontPage, create the basic page structure, and build a cascading style sheet.

I made use of cascading style sheet based formatting far more than I had done in the past.

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

The Results

The Omniton web site looks best on 1024 x 768 or better resolution displays, but it is also more than acceptable with 800 x 600 resolution displays.

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

The Omniton web site went live in June 2004.