My original website was launched back in October 2006 and remained largely unchanged through to 2011. It then had a bit of a face lift, but the underlying code was very similar. Plain old html, basic CSS and some Server Side Includes to glue it all together.
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| My original Website |
Over the last few years I've come to accept that a responsive site would be a big step forward. My old design did work on a phone, but everything was tiny and when I tried to scale if for mobiles it didn't look pretty on the desktop.
I found myself creating a few pages which didn't really work very well then I would give up and try something new. I kept coming back to Wordpress, but I just couldn't figure out how to create the gallery pages and payment integration. Fast forward 12 months and I came across w3schools.com at first I started working through some of their tutorials. I then stumbled on their templates. Some templates were great other not so great, but there were elements of a number which were really appealing. I downloaded their main style sheet and started to unpick it. It then became apparent all of their templates used the same CSS sheet, so I could pick and choose the bits which I wanted.
After building up a front page and thinking carefully about the structure I set about working on populating the back-end. The most efficient way would have been a database, but I had already decided this was not the route for me. I eventually settled on making the best use of Server Side Includes and creating a set of simple pages which could be easily duplicated and edited in notepad++.
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| Fresh new look |
All in all I'm a bit of a luddite when it comes to new technology, but hopefully my fresh new design will stand the test of time and be usable on mobile phones at long last!
Resources:
www.cambridgeimages.co.uk
www.w3schools.com
