Pragmatic Training Website

In May 2006, I started to build a new website for Pragmatic Training, a specialised scuba diving company based in Rye, Victoria.

Design Philosophy

The design of the Pragmatic Training web site was based on elements of the Mollio template by Pete Ottery, plus some other ideas I had seen and been mulling over. 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 Pragmatic Training website:

• Etomite CMS
  (running on a Linux platform using Apache, MySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer v6.0
• 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 Pragmatic Training website 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 are also used to generate pages from the documents database, e.g. site map, web links, testimonials, promotions 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. A number of Etomite snippets pick up content from the phpBB forums to create pages and/or page elements for the main web site pages. The Articles, Frequently Asked Questions, Downloads and Recent Announcements pages are all created this way.

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

Web Standards

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

The Pragmatic Training website went live in early August 2006.