Following on from my post about updating Lorraine’s website I thought I would post a few things about the changes here.
Firstly, thanks to Maddie for the cool design, finally got us away from the monolithic menu structure of old!
So the new site has a main menu across the top for the main areas of the site, with a further menu down the left column that changes depending on what area you are in. You can see where you are at all times because the main area and page from the left menu will remain highlighted as long as you are on that page. These menus also stay static on the page, only the content of the central area of the page changes and scrolls within a fixed width.
These menus are php driven, dependant on what page you are on, so no need for lots of static pages needing changed all the time!
The pages themselves are organised a lot more hierarchically (is that really a word) than before – no crazy long blahblah.shtml page to link to. Means the underlying structure is a lot easier to maintain.
Images also got moved into their own folders and sub-folders rather than sharing the same directory as all the .shtml files.
The front end to the booking system got cleaned up a lot, as did the back end as there was a lot of repitition in there – much better organised now. Poor Lorraine still has a really bland bunch of pages to edit the data on, compared to the front end 🙂
All the forms got fancied up with some JQuery niceness to make them more interactive and useful. The forms also result in a nice faded in results page rather than flicking over to a generic thankyou page.
htaccess drives a few 301 permanent redirects from the old pages to new to make sure any existing links out there still hold valid. Lorraine has fought hard for her google ranking and doesn’t want to lose it.
Still a few minor tweaks here and there but the site is 100% html valid and would be 100%css valid if it wasn’t for the nice rounded borders on some of the site elements.
Possibly todos,
- Provide an alternate style sheet in different colors for those that prefer high contrast.
- make everything php rather than the mix of php/perl at the moment… maybe…
- think about alternate language stuff?
- CSS3