SpinnerWebs

Screenshot of the Gwyn Davies website

Website: www.gwynandlukedavies.co.uk

Date completed: March 2006

Technologies used:

• XHTML
• CSS
• PHP

Drowning in abbreviations? To find out what these letters stand for, take a look at the technology page.

Additional Services:

• Hosting Setup

Summary

A Herefordshire garage was looking to expand its business and offer high-tech electronic chip tuning. A site was requested to promote this new service, among other things.

Description

It was clear that to promote such a cutting-edge service as Electronic Chip Tuning, the backing website would have to be of high quality. We set to work on providing such a product.

Design

While many might primarily associate car services with grease and grime, this image was not appropriate for this new service. Instead of using a dark-colour based site, we opted for a clean, white, almost scientific background colour - simple but very effective, as was our choice of font. We designed the site with an overall balanced feel - pictures were on the far right, the navigation bar on the far left; the title was centred and the text was justified.

It is worth noting that, although accessibility was not a primary goal in this project, pages were nonetheless usable when styling was turned off.

Code

We used XHTML 1.0 Transitional as the markup language in this case. This gave us sufficient flexibility with such elements as the contact form, whilst permitting us to still use the modern XHTML specification.

CSS was, of course, used for the general design of the site. The navigation bar made use of the facilities in CSS to enable the hover effect.

As always, we also ensured that the code we used conformed to W3C specifications.

Bearing in mind that changes might be required in the future, we used PHP to create a structure that would allow quick and easy modification of the site content if required.

We also used PHP to select the list of car models depending on the manufacturer selected, rather than lumping all models together on one page, which would not have been a good idea. From the potential customer's point of view, this would have pointlessly increased page loading time and provided a huge amount of unnecessary information.

Hosting setup

Part of the contract included the setup of the hosting and email. We guided the client through the setup process and made more technical changes ourselves, including setting up a subdomain - tuning.gwynandlukedavies.co.uk.

Client response

The client, we are pleased to say, was happy with the site and was already promoting it on invoices. Can we assist you in a similar way?

We look forward to designing your own website!