The Daily Blog

Reboot notes

1st May 2006  Post a comment

I have participated in every CSS Reboot since it was first started in May 2005. The old design of ‘my company’ website has been online since September 2005 and although I didn’t consider it a full redesign, because it only consisted of one page, it proved reasonably popular and was better than a splash page.

I am always trying out new layouts and experimenting with graphical ideas, but for some reason designing a website for Orange tape Studios was always difficult. The May 1st reboot gave me a chance to force myself to produce something, and the deadline actually helped me focus and get on with it.

The site as a whole has grow from a one page site, to a traditional multiple page site - this wasn’t to over complicate things, but rather a way of giving each major piece of information (who we are, what we do, stuff we have done, communicate with us) its own page. Similarly, the portfolio has moved from 3 simple links, to individual pages for each project so that a brief description and screenshots can be included.

By far the biggest change is to the back end of Orange tape Studios website, and, if you don’t speak geek that means how we (being me and my business partner, Andy) manage the content displayed on the front end, which is what your browser sees. Since 2004 when I got into blogging I used an amazing piece of software called Textpattern, mainly because it was free. It served me just fine for my weblog UK Thoughts for over a year. Skip to January of this year and I discovered Symphony, an XSLT based publishing system and haven’t looked back since - it powers this weblog and now Orange tape Studios.

Hopefully the reboot will be a success for all involved and I will post some of my personal favorites’ once I have had a chance to look around.

- David Longworth

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