This site is a collaboration of 2 students of Economics and 1 student of
Actuarial Sciences, created as an exercise in the subject of webdesign.
The site itself was developed using the
Microsoft Expressionweb 4
package. Design and content of the site was developed with these
criteria in mind:
·
Template
characteristics: The template for the site (“Personal 6”) was chosen for
the simple aesthetics of its layout, as an easy overview of site
structure was a design goal. The template has a simple navigation-bar in
its heading which provides a convenient “dashboard” for navigation and a
footer providing direct access to main content. Templates with left- or
right-margin menu-boxes were discarded as they disturbed the
“window”-style center display of content.
·
The “master” .dwt
file was edited to allow for all content to be displayed in a fixed
width box with flexible height. This was to ease the flow of image- and
text-heavy pages without breaking consistency. The “subtitle” was
removed to create space for a static title, displaying the sitename on
all pages. This serves as an anchor for the user to always return to the
title screen while creating the impression of new content replacing old,
instead of “changing the page”. The top-menu/footer relationship was
changed so that the top menu now displays links to sites with different
types of information (about, contact) and the footer provides navigation
through subsites displaying the sites main content, animals of the
continents.
·
The template used
provided 4 CSS-styles, of which 2 were used. The template standard was
“Style2.css” which provided color and formatting standards of the entire
site, providing consistency. “Style2.css” also does a preliminary load
of the “layout.css” file, which provided the DIV tag-standards of the
site. This is mainly accommodates content accessibility (plaintext &
images) during slow load-times and conveniently provides a “reading
mode” for text heavy parts, when viewed on Apple iOS devices.
·
The “style 2.css” can
be summarized as:
o
“Body”-part decides
the font-family (Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif) and -size, as
well as the standard background image, set as “repeating” to allow for
the varying length of the pages.
o
The
“container”-statement provides the outline of the entire site and
carries the banner, menu, main content and footer. Specifies the grey
outline size and white background of the “window”.
o
“Masthead” holds the
banner-image and the title-text in place and static on all pages. Later
in the code rules (selectors) for title-text font and sizes are
specified.
o
“Navigation”
specifies the color of the top-navigation and border color/size. The
“button” look of the links in the navigation-bar is specified in a
selector later in the code that correctly formats any link put inside
this style.
o
The next part defines
different column-styles, where only the “column_l” part was used in this
project, its width adjusted to fill the entire content-box. The
“column_r” style was saved in case it was needed.
o
The “content” part
only keeps background color consistent and is the main anchor for text
and images put on individual pages.
o
“Footer” part
provides alignment of the “continent-navigator” at the very bottom of
every page. Later in the code, selectors for standard written (<p>) text
are specified for consistent color and size.
o
The “typography” part
provides quick access to site-standards of headline, plain-text, etc.
(<h2>) was mainly used for headlines while plaintext used (<p>) with
consistent autostyling.
o
Lastly, the CSS
specifies standard (that is, non-menu) styling for “links”. The
selectors change the “hover”-color but keeps everything else the same.
·
Since the nature of
this work is for exercise only and in an academic context, it has
neither commercial incentive nor potential for widespread
recognition/misattribution of the media provided.
The amount of non-original content on this site was taken only in
the amount needed/considered fair for the purpose of the site. This
combined with the implied limited lifespan of the site, is in our
opinion enough for our non-original reproductions to be considered
“Fair-Use” (http://libguides.mit.edu/usingimages).
Our use of “Google-images” made it difficult for us to provide citations
for content used, so if any creator feels deprived of their work, they
are welcome to email us and we will take care to attribute correctly or
remove the content altogether.