NZWood (campaign site)
Size: 4 template pages
My professional status: employee at Shift
Website client: NZWood
Dates: August 2007
Categories: Front-end developer, CSS-based layout, ExpressionEngine, Small sites
Brief: to build a set of template pages for the NZWood campaign website, as part of a series of websites for the organisation. The campaign site was designed to be highly interactive and included campaign videos and copies of print ads, as well as online discussions about many aspects of the campaign message.
My responsibilities included:
- Development of the site in CSS and HTML 4.01 Transitional, which would then be integrated into the ExpressionEngine CMS
- Liaising closely with Tom St George, the ExpressionEngine developer, to ensure that all templates could be easily integrated into the CMS
- Hand-coding in HTML 4.01 Transitional to a reasonable level of accessibility
- Extensive testing of the site at all stages of the development process, ensuring complete consistency across the following browsers and platforms:
- PC: Internet Explorer 5.01, IE5.5, IE6, IE7; Firefox, Netscape, Opera
- Mac: Firefox, Netscape, Opera, Safari
- Ensuring that every page and stylesheet had been validated using the W3C Markup Validation Service and that it conformed to HTML 4.01 Transitional requirements
- Development of print stylesheets sitewide.
The campaign site design and build was closely based on the corporate site, both in order to maintain a level of consistency across all the NZWood sites, and also because it would enable the technical aspects of the production process (HTML build and CMS programming) to be completed quickly and efficiently.
The site included campaign videos and artwork displayed as a Flash banner across the top of each page, which also functioned as the site navigation. An important part of my job was therefore to build a non-Flash version so that users without Flash could still navigate through the site. The templates were designed in a modular fashion, with the main content elements being broken down into various modules which could be included on any page via the CMS, in any order that the client wished.