Web Development
Ai Solutions Ltd
For the latest Ai Solutions corporate web, we needed to produce website to meet our future needs. This meant a new layout that would work across as many devices and browsers as possible. The quickest option was to start with a template layout, but unfortunately all of these are still delivered with messy table markup underneath.
This meant that the initial challenge was to take a template layout that we liked and convert it to a CSS based layout. The one we had chosen was luckily quite easy to convert, and with a few tweaks in Flash for our own style (and to get the movies to play with XHTML markup), we then needed to update the content.
Initially I was not looking forward to this challenge, as the content had been produced over the last 5 years, so contained a number of pages created with table layouts, and almost all of the pages included non-XHTML code.
The process of updating the original pages did take some time, but was greatly helped by the structure we had built into the site in 2001. There are still many pages within the site that are not completely XHTML, such as in the Knowledge Base (and this may never be completely converted), but where it matters, the code is now a lot cleaner and simpler. This has meant that the increased overhead of the extra graphics and Flash movies, has been offset by the greatly reduced size of each page.
With that and the addition of a members area, the site was ready to publish very quickly. All that is left to do, is provide a style sheet for PDAs and handhelds, and it will be complete.
Archive - Febuary 2001
For the Ai Solutions corporate web, we needed the flexibility of standard borders that we had with the original FrontPage version, but also the ability to link into databases to display dynamic content from one layout page.
cdmUK.com had given us plenty of experience with ASP, so this looked the quickest route to goal. We also needed a way of displaying the same content correctly under both IE and Netscape.
Once the inital border layout had been designed and tested with both browsers, it was time to very quickly move the content across from the old Frontpage web, and then to get it published. Hey presto, a brand new layout with dynamic content for newsletters, press releases, competitions and anything else we could think of quickly and simply!
