Coachwood Website

I've known Victoria Taylor, Managing Director of Coachwood Computer & Executive Recruitment for many years. During a meeting with her in September 2003, I suggested that her company website left a lot to be desired.

In fact it was one big JPEG file. Yes, just the one page and the one graphic image which contained the content. Of course all of that content was totally invisible to any search engine. I offered to build her a replacement web page to overcome those limitations.

When I sat down to build the page the following Friday night, I got a bit carried away. The result was that by the end of the weekend, I had built an entire website for the company. (Remember, I had already built the Expert People and Oakton People websites, so I had some insight into what a recruitment company website should contain.)

Design Philosophy

The idea was to keep it simple and clean. In hindsight, I probably didn't do that as well as I could have. I also tried to "humanise" the site more than I normally would by including plenty of people images. I used an up-to-date version of the content ideas I'd developed while building the successful Expert People and Oakton People website.

The Tools

The following software tools were used to build the Coachwood website:

• 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 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.

The Results

By the end of the weekend I had published the result as a subset of my own website. By email, I invited Victoria and her team to comment and suggest any additional content. That week they provided me with some additional bits and pieces, and a week later, early in October 2003, the new website went live.