The Trust Website

In November 2005, I was asked by the team at The Trust bar, restaurant and cafe to build them a new website.

Venue and food shots are by Brett Sleeth of Pitch Black Productions.

Design Philosophy

I wanted a clean, simple but friendly and inviting look for The Trust website. Plus I wanted to continue using CSS for layout instead of tables.

The previous version of The Trust website was built by a designer as a pure Macromedia Flash based website. It looked great. But the information was hard to access and absolutely nothing was seen by a search engine. Also the staff at The Trust couldn't maintain the website.

The starting point for the design of the new version of The Trust website was a template by Andre Czausov. This CSS based table less template was ported to Etomite and modified to meet my requirements.

Tools

The following software tools were used to build The Trust 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 Trust website runs using the Etomite Content Management System, 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, news listing etc.

The DHTML Menu used for the main top menu is licensed from Milonic. The menu data is generated from the Etomite document database.

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

Web Standards

The Trust 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 Trust colour scheme using Adobe PhotoShop CS.

Then it was time to port across the existing content, research and write new content, and build the required web pages.

The Results

The Trust website looks best on 1024 x 768 or better resolution displays.

The new The Trust website went live in mid December 2005.