WINenergy Website

In October 2005, I was asked by the team at WINenergy to build them a new website.

Design Philosophy

I wanted a clean, simple but friendly and inviting look for the WINenergy website. Plus I wanted to switch to using CSS for layout instead of tables.

The starting point for the design of the WINenergy web site was the andreas02 template by Andreas Viklund. This CSS based table less template was ported to Etomite, modified to meet my requirements, plus made more cross-platform browser friendly.

The Tools

The following software tools were used to build the WINenergy 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 WINenergy 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 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, news listing etc.

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

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

Web Standards

The WINenergy 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 WINenergy colour scheme using Adobe PhotoShop CS.

Then it was time to research and write the content, and build the required web pages. As WINenergy only had a very basic, interim website up and running, it was all done from scratch.

The Results

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

The new WINenergy website went live in early November 2005.