Protech Australia Website

In February 1996, I designed and built a business to business website for Protech Australia. The result was a first generation website that more or less replicated the information in the company newsletters, brochures etc. Just over 50 web pages told the story.

The pages tended to just be a long, single column of text with the occasional graphic of a product. Given that most people were using computers with screens set to 640x480, that wasn't a real problem and it looked okay. But the resulting pages looked a bit ordinary at 800x600 and downright ugly at 1024x768. Given that you just couldn't rely on frames and tables to work well across the common browsers back then, I decided that so as to provide maximum accessibility, we'd just have to live with those limitations.

Essentially there was a three level architecture, and some time was taken to design a simple navigation path through the structure. Common elements were a banner across the top of each page, plus a very simple graphics and text based navigation bar across the bottom of each page. Most of the design work went in to the page banners.

Protech Australia Website Tools of the Trade

The main tools used to build the Protech Australia website included:

• The HotDog Web Editor v1.3.1
• Microsoft Word v6
• Netscape Navigator v2
• Trumpet Winsock v2
• CorelDRAW! v4
• Adobe Photoshop v3
• Graphic Workshop v1.1j
• GIF Construction Set v1.0d
• WinGIF v1.4
• Paint Shop Pro v3.11
• Mapedit v1.4.

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