The Gutteridge family website

29 January 2009

This website was first released in 2004. Since then I’ve always been threatening to refresh it. At the end off 2006 I nearly did, under my own CMS. I had a beautiful theme and layout based on the default WordPress theme.

A few years on and I’ve decided to cut the brief a bit and get to work.

When I first created the site, I blagged it all. I didn’t have an Internet connection and Internet Explorer 5 was the default browser for most computers. I didn’t really know HTML or JavaScript, or anything else for that matter. I hideously combined the two together and created a monster of a frame site that somehow worked. And to this very day, it still does. That is, under Internet Explorer.

But now I have knowledge and principles. I’ve redesigned the site to comply with a few of them. It had to be simple and it had to focus on the content. Everything I write these days has to comply with XHTML and CSS. I think forcing XML compliance on HTML is brilliant. It keeps your code neat and makes sure you’re not cutting corners.

Also I’m a great believer of separating style and layout from content. A basic page by myself is essentially a static HTML page with a few PHP includes for the header and footer. The layout is set in unobtrusive DIV tags and then formatted by CSS. This makes the HTML code so clean and easy to read. The idea being that people can edit it without obliterating the style or layout.

It’s a nice website and it works well. I just took all the copy and images for the original, stripped them of formatting and resized the images down to reasonable sizes, and stuck it to this new format. I couldn’t be happier.

Obviously a CMS might be an idea if people wanted to edit the site without HTML knowledge. I’m not too concerned because of the time it would take to set this up versus people that are actually interested ratio.

For my own peace of mind I wouldn’t mind better human readable URLs. Before, we had mixed case and dots and slashes and all sorts. Now I’ve got this principle of lowercase and dashes only. Full stops for server-side files. But I’d rather them be extentionless. I don’t particularly like seeing a trailing slash or a file extension at the end of my URLs. Okay techically I’m referencing PHP files or directories and it would help the server if I adress this correctly. However, I’m not building these web sites for servers or even geeks, I’m doing it for end-users, people who don’t want to put up jargon. And extensions mean bugger all to your average user who isn’t concerned about such things. A prettier URL would make much more sense.

Anyway, before I start getting mad, take a peak.

Links
Gutteridge family website
Old Gutteridge family website (very buggy)