NZWood (corporate site)
Size: 19 template pages
My professional status: employee at Shift
Website client: NZWood
Dates: June - July 2007
Categories: Front-end developer, CSS-based layout, ExpressionEngine, Medium sites
Brief: to build a set of template pages for the NZWood corporate website, which would be the first in a series of websites for the organisation. The corporate site dealt mainly with information, news, and media releases about NZWood, which is an industry-wide programme designed to encourage and expand the use of wood in New Zealand.
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, Shift's 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.
This was a nice straightforward set of templates, and was designed as the first of a number of interlinked sites for NZWood. The site was managed with the ExpressionEngine CMS, and a large part of my role (in addition to the HTML/CSS build) was to liaise closely with Tom St George, our EE developer to ensure that my templates worked well within ExpressionEngine. This was one of the first EE sites I built, and I found it very interesting to work alongside Tom, improving my understanding of the most efficient template-building techniques with the ExpressionEngine CMS in mind.