Tuesday 6 March 2007

New Zealand and Flat HTML

I've spent a few weeks in New Zealand on holiday, which is why I've been so quiet for the past month. BTW, New Zealand is breathtakingly beautiful. But now I'm getting back into work mode again - and trying not to think of the extra kilos I've put on from all the insanely good food over there.

I've been spending some time working on my site - though, as yet, have nothing to show for it. I'm currently replacing what I have already there - trying to make it a bit more dynamically-generated. But I haven't actually deployed that yet. I'll be blogging about my sliding doors tabbing system in a moment, though, so I figured I should mention it.

Mainly I feel good as I set up a really quick website for my Aunt and Uncle. My Aunt is a Dietitian and together they have a business doing HACCP accreditation. This is something to do with making sure people are handling food safely in their kitchens (eg in Nursing Homes). They wanted a really bog-standard website up so people know they're Out There.

This is what I came up with: Simply HACCP

It's actually a flat-html site atm, but I used rails to generate the pages as a sort of overkill CMS. I wanted to see if it was worthwhile doing something like this - and it seems to be just fine. It meant I could work independantly on the layout/styling/content. When I was happy I just dumped it all to flat html and saved each file. There are only four pages, so that part wasn't hard.

In all it only took me about 2.5 hours of work - though, admittedly I had done some of the styling at an earlier date - including finding and splicing together the foody pictures from the creative commons. Maybe I can do ordinary websites as well as web apps. Of course, my web design is exceedingly basic - but it was reasonable enough for my Aunt to be happy. It's never going to win a design award, but compared with the crud that can come out of your standard FrontPage site it's even reasonably professional.

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