The Idea
This is my entry for the openwebdesign.org competition (March '06). To enter the competition I had to base my design on a theme which was chosen to be "The City" and this is what I came up with.
The Code
Busy City has been coded entirely in XHTML 1.1 & CSS. No tables were touched in the making of this website. Isn't that cool? As well as being cool, using XHTML & CSS has many advantages such as:
- Cleaner Code: Adherence to strict guidelines results in cleaner code. All extraneous or ambiguous elements are eliminated, so pages are smaller, load faster, and render correctly.
- Interoperability and Accessibility: XHTML is currently readable by the greatest number of browsers, devices and assistive technologies like screen readers. Accessibility is quickly becoming a legal issue.
- Search Engine Friendly Code: XHTML produces pages that search engine spiders find easy to understand. There are no presentational elements or bloated code to confuse the spiders, so they'll crawl everything that matters and rank you accordingly.
- Design Consistency: With CSS, the same style elements can be applied to every page of a site. From the first page forward, your visitors will be presented with a consistent design scheme, building their comfort level and effectively promoting your brand.
- Easy Maintenance: Changes to CSS web page designs are simple. Instead of having to go back and alter every single page of your site, with CSS only the relevant style sheets have to be updated, saving you hours of work and limiting the introduction of possible errors.
The Examples
Here are some example elements that you may end up using on your website.
- An un-ordered list
- With several items
- To give you an example
Some blockquote text. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Cras semper neque ac tellus. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci.
The Author
My name is Jenna Smith, and I am a 20 year old female from Cambridgeshire, UK. I work full time as a Web Designer for a very well known company and freelance out of work through my growldesign website.
I made my first website when I was 11 years old and have been using XHTML & CSS for around 2 years. Other languages I know include PHP, MySQL, XML and XSLT. For a full list, take a look at my website.
If you are a small business wanting an online presence, or a company looking to outsource, feel free to contact me for a quote.