Raydon Website

In February 2006, circumstances resulted in me needing to put my property "Raydon" on the market. While the real estate agent appointed would no doubt add the property to their website, I decided to build my own supporting web site to provide more information to prospective buyers. Thus the Raydon website was born.

Design Philosophy

I wanted a clean, simple but friendly and inviting look for the Raydon website. Something that reflected the rural and nature features of the property. Plus I wanted to continue my progression from tables to using CSS for layout of the page elements.

The Tools

The following software tools were used to build the Raydon 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 CS
• Adobe ImageReady CS
• Adobe Illustrator CS
• WS_FTP for Windows
• HTML Tidy
• NoteTab Pro
• TopStyle Pro

Platform

The Raydon 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 used 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 simple CSS based list menu is used for the main menu, the data for which is generated by an Etomite snippet.

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

Web Standards

The Raydon website respects W3C standards. The website 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 Raydon website looks best on 800 x 600 or better resolution displays.

The Raydon website went live in early February 2006.