A Bit of Web Stuff
A slightly different website design this time. The client makes handmade soaps - the original recipe as great granny might have made it type. The client has also been hinting for some time about getting it done and then changing a bunch of things so the incentive to finish the thing was somewhat less than compelling.
I decided on an Edwardian style to emphasize the ‘old fashioned’ nature of the product. Most handmade soap makers go for the ‘ecofriendly cottage craft’ approach, full of earthy colours and leaves.
I have several old Victorian books and magazines so the artwork was based on those. A single colour background with watermark graphics and a few flourishes. I went against my usual tendency to use sans serif graphics and used Bookman Old Style/Times New Roman.
It’s not quite finished yet but looks uncluttered yet with an Edwardian ambience.
I am trying, as years ago, to use a single stylesheet and it almost worked this time but good old IE6 fouled things up as usual. I used to design for IE6 and then fiddle around with the other browsers. Now I design for Mozilla and fiddle IE into shape.
In this case, there were a few positioning problems and getting the footer graphic aligned with the top graphic. Because the bulk of the stylesheet was fine, I used Microsoft’s IE conditional statements to insert MSIE styles into the sheet. A year ago, I would use a browser sniffer and two stylesheets.
The site is search friendly. The title text is real text and there are additional keywords under that. Other than the word ‘TRADITIONAL’, every piece of text is real text. It’s only been up a couple of days and Google hasn’t found it yet but I’ll keep you up to date.