Round Peg Recruitment

Round Peg - homepage

Website: roundpeg.co.nz (site has since been redesigned) - view screenshots

Size: 5 pages

My professional status: independent web designer/developer

Website client: Linda Ashton, Director, Round Peg

Dates: January - February 2009

Categories: Scoping/pitching/quoting, Client liaison, Project manager, Front-end developer, Content-loader, CSS-based layout, No CMS, Small sites

Brief: to build and content-load the Round Peg website, following a design by Shelley Masters. Round Peg was a new recruitment agency concept developed by Linda Ashton that works in-house alongside employers, managing the recruitment process on their behalf.

The initial aims of the site were to establish a web presence for the company and to explain exactly what Round Peg can offer to both employers and employees. The site was to be integrated with a backend database management system which would allow Linda to organise the employers, employees, job vacancies and CVs on her books.

Ali, Tom and Shelley - thanks for that, I'm very pleased with the work you have done and the cost.

Linda Ashton, Director, Round Peg

My responsibilities included:

  • Development of the five page designs in CSS and HTML 4.01 Transitional to a reasonable level of accessibility, creating the HTML and CSS for the whole working site
  • Coding and adding all the content sitewide
  • Advising the client on the latest Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques, and ensuring that all image-replaced code supported SEO as much as possible
  • Extensive testing of the site at all stages of the development process, ensuring complete consistency across the following browsers and platforms:
    • PC: Internet Explorer IE6, IE7; Firefox
    • 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 lovely little site, and it was great working on Shelley's design. The way the type is laid out and how it wraps is very important in this design, and as this cannot be achieved or controlled in different platforms by HTML alone, I decided to utilise a higher level of image replacement than I would normally do, especially on the homepage, which is virtually all image-replaced.

As Round Peg was a new company, seeking to establish a web presence for the first time, it was vital that the HTML be carefully crafted to achieve Search Engine Optimisation for all sections of the site - including image-replaced elements. For this reason I added a number of text-indented headers and subheaders to the HTML. These do not appear in the design, but they were visible to search engines and also when the page is printed. This improved both search engine ranking and the usefulness of printed pages to the user.

I came in way under-budget with this build, which enabled the client to invest more money in the database back-end.