Project: Website Consulting
Patron: Zetaweb
Medium: Photoshop 7.0
Status: Draft 2
Deadline: July 30

So, I was lucky enough to be asked to review what the zeta boyz were doing for Nashotah House. Though it still needs some tweaking, I think the site is coming together. They had built the back end and had basic colors chosen, I just pushed the design a bit so it became more vibrant. Basically I just did some layout adjustment to the header image and added the watermark. I think it is enough of an improvement over the current site to wow the dean.

What I learned is I don't know photoshop as well as I know illustrator. Something that would have taken me 2 seconds in illustrator left me struggling for 2 hours in photoshop. All because we were missing a font, so we had to work with a rasterized image. We hope to get the font at some point, but it means that we are going to be rebuilding the thing.

At somepoint the dicussion got onto breaking out of the plone navigational box. Basically, tabs or no tabs? Something artsy (and probably done with slices in photoshop) or something dynamic though plone and zope. I always prefer to generate it dynamically if possible, since that allows much more flexibility for change. The probably is: dynamic choices are not always supported by different browsers. Even this new version of the site looks slightly different on a mac, on a pc, in mozilla, in ie, etc. So slices is a good way to tack all that down so that the site always looks the same on different machines, without having to do too much scripting and browser detecting. Though the pis-cis site is boring, it does look exactly the same on anything other than a digital phone. (I agree though, it is boring)

I don't think it was too much of a big deal for the nh site, its not trying to be cutting edge but academic in design. In the future I think I'm going to have to study a bit more on user interface design and how people navigate.