Thursday 25 May 2017

New website - www.cambridgeimages.co.uk


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.

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.

For the last 18 months or so I've been going round in circles. I tried WordPress, Drupal and various others content management systems (the names of which now escape me), I looked at SquareSpace and one or two other hosted managed solutions. I also downloaded various CSS templates.

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++.


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