LuCaspeRobin + Thomas ;-)

Stories on Webdesign

Focolare Movement

01 April 2003

small screenshot of the alternative website for Focolare A very dear old friend, with which I recently have hooked up with again, was very busy with a website he had made, and proudly told me about all the efforts he'd put into it and the reactions he'd gotten. Taking a look at the site I realised it had a great potential, but the structure and content was very disorganised. To find anything you'd have to know where it was at. And as a visitor of a site that's one thing you don't want to do: looking for the needle in the haystack. So, I suggested to him to do a redesign of his webpages and at the same time restructure the whole thing. As he didn't know any HTML I'd have to make the markup of the site so easy and understandable that he with his very little knowledge could maintain the site afterwards.

http://www.focolare.net I started out with one of the designs of the <div> "Holy Grail" designs, and slowly adapted it to fit the needs of this site. It ended up quite nicely, with the most important stuff (navigation, quotes, contactinformation) always present in small boxes floating on the left hand side of the content. Setting up the navigation included structuring the content of the site at the same time. Now it is easy to find what you need. Furthermore the site was supposed to be in three languages (English, Dutch and Italian), so I designed three sites: One in purple for the English part, one in blue for the Dutch part and one in green for the Italian part. Structure and layout are the same, only the colourschemes differ. The site validates at the W3C XHTML and CSS Validators.

In the end it was obvious that my design was very pleasing, nice-looking and functional, but that my friend would not be able to learn HTML quick enough and thorough enough to be able to maintain the site for himself. That's why I'm planning to move the whole site into the CMS Movable Type during this Fall (2003). That way my friend only needs to add the content, place it in a category and click "publish"!

Posted by Sebastiaan Naafs - van Dijk | top

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    ... on 29 March 2024 @ 12:06