Primary Content
Enable.co.uk Usability
Project Type: Content-based information website
Description: This self-driven project aimed at creating a website which provides information and guidelines on usability for website designers and developers.
The entire implementation of this project (i.e. idea, concept, design and programming) was done just by me. A key goal of this project was to give each part of the website its own tier. This meant that every piece of functionality had to be kept in its own "layer" e.g. MySQL stored procedures were used for the database tier, Smarty templates were used to store the XHTML markup, CSS files were responsible for the presentation and plain PHP files were used to get things working. Everything on enable.co.uk was developed using PHP 5 OOP techniques, allowing for easy maintenance and excellent scalability.
The user interface was designed to make site navigation as simple and easy as possible while containing a wealth of information. All visual elements were designed in Adobe Photoshop with a simple colour palette so the main focus would be on the content. The website is based on an elastic, tableless layout. EMs are used for sizing the layout. I'm a believer in web standards, so it was important for me to separate structure from presentation by using XHTML and CSS. The structure was set up to validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict and be search engine orientated. The site was not only developed to follow web standards throughout but also to be cross-browser compatible.
Software: PSPad Text Editor, Adobe Photoshop, phpMyAdmin (MySQL database administration tool)
Technologies: PHP 5, Smarty Template Engine, MySQL, XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS 2.1
Duration: 12 weeks
Completion Date: September 2008
Link: http://enable.pording.de