The Scuba Doctor Website

The Scuba Doctor Website, May 2006.

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

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

Web Standards

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

The Scuba Doctor Website 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 Scuba Doctor Website Results

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

The Scuba Doctor website went live in early May 2006.