four seasons gazebo

November 12th, 2008

this month saw the launch of a website that i was asked to update and redesign. the original site was rather cluttered and was aligned to the left of the page leaving a large amount of white space to the right, it was also designed to fit into an 800 pixel wide monitor – which meant it looking very thin.

as the content was already in place, most of my time was spent creating a fresh look that would sit comfortably in both an 800 pixel wide resolution while still looking good with wider resolution screens. this was achieved with a large background which would fill a 1024 wide screen (still the web’s most popular screen resolution). the page was also designed to sit centrally so larger resolution screens would gain equal space on the left and right of the screen.

the original site did not take into any consideration search engine optimisation – although the site’s rankings within searches on for popular keywords were very good – the navigation was text based, there were no meta tags on any of the pages and it was built using tables which created very large document sizes where the content was lost in a sea of html tags and spacer images.

i built the site in adobe dreamweaver and i always use templates because they are a fantastic way of keeping your design and overall site consistent. the template was created with div and an external css to control the look and layout of the site. additional style sheet’s were created for some of the specific pages where specific content styling was only featured on that individual page – for example the colour shift on the commercial gazebo page.

the final two additions to the site was a flash based scrolling gallery to show off some of the products and services that the company and a news panel that could be updated by the client using cushy cms.

you can view the finished website here; www.fsgltd.co.uk.

Tags: gazebo, Portfolio, website, website design