dStudio Reworking

February 28th, 2011

Three days a week I work at a Fine Art Print studio, printing reproductions of artists and illustrators work. Part of returning to work after two weeks off at Christmas is a yearly review of our prices and services, I also take care of the website – and this year it definitely needed a spring winter clean.

Before and after.

It was one of the last websites I built using tables (yes, it’s that old) and I’d never had the chance to translate it to a div/css layout. So that was the first job. It’s not completely tableless, there are plenty of tables used to display pricing information — that’s what tables are for. I also removed the third column that previously highlighted some of our artists work, this allowed for a wider content area. The last main layout change was loosing the container and stretching the background to the full width of the page, I made the image 1650 pixels wide – wide enough to cater for over 90% of people that view the website. Good enough for me.

Previously I used Adobe Flash to create a slide show of 5/6 images to advertise our services, this needed to be replaced due to seeing an increase in people viewing our website on Apple made portable devices, i.e. the iPhone and iPad. Although not quite ready to produce a mobile version of the website, it was important to loose the Flash content. So this was replaced with a simple JQuery carousel. I hadn’t used one outside of WordPress before, so I went on a Google and stumbled across Billy The Carousel by Jason Howmans, a really simple solution for inserting a carousel for people who aren’t comfortable with hand coding JQuery – it’s on my list of things to do, but for now I have to rely on developers creating open-sourced plugins and scripts.

View the shiny new website here; http://digitalprintdesign.co.uk

Tags: css, digital print design, dstudio, flash, html, jquery, redevelop