Paul Evans

Here is some background on how I designed and implemented this site.

The approach to design focused on:

• a simple aesthetic
• good accessibility.

Implementation was a matter of choosing between a variety of open source content management and blog systems.

Design

There is a huge amount of discussion on various websites (see A List Apart for example) about how to design good pages. I have a strong preference for simple typography and the design and guidance on Mark Boulton’s site came closest to my requirements. See in particular his Five Simple Steps

So the design has been developed around simple navigation, few colours and limited navigation.

The theme is based on ideas in White as milk and is now an adapted version of the Infinium theme.

Accessibility

This is a huge subject on which I plan to do more. So far the emphasis has been on a robust way for the site to adapt to changes in text size implemented by the user in their browser. Try it. All the text and the sizes of the layout should scale up consistently.

Implementation

The choice of software was between:

• drupal
• joomla
• wordpress

I got some way with implementations of the first two as the site seemed to need a content management system more than a blog.  Both proved over complex for the task. This is now based on WordPress even though the blog is probably the secondary requirement.

Comments

Comments are welcome on this page.