The Scuba Doctor Web Site

In April 2006, I started to build a new web site for The Scuba Doctor, a specialised scuba diving company based in Rye, Victoria.

Design Philosophy

The starting point for the design of The Scuba Doctor web site was the Mollio template layout Type C variation by Pete Ottery. This CSS based table-less template was ported to Etomite, modified to meet our requirements, plus made more cross-platform browser friendly.

The Tools

The following software tools were used to build The Scuba Doctor 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 Scuba Doctor 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 or adapted 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, Google XML sitemap listing etc.

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 phpBB bulletin board package is used for the forums.

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

Web Standards

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

Site Construction

Various page elements were built and/or adapted to the colour scheme chosen using Adobe PhotoShop CS.

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

The Results

The Scuba Doctor web site looks best on 800 x 600 or better resolution displays.

The Scuba Doctor web site went live in early May 2006.