NZWood (corporate site)

NZWood Corporate

Link: NZWood

Size: 19 template pages

My professional status: employee at Shift

Website client: NZWood

Dates: June - July 2007

Brief: to build a set of template pages for the NZWood corporate website, which would be the first in a series of websites for the organisation. The corporate site deals mainly with information, news, and media releases about NZWood, which is an industry-wide programme designed to encourage and expand the use of wood in New Zealand.

My responsibilities included:

  • Development of the site in pure CSS and HTML 4.01 Transitional, which would then be integrated into the Expression Engine CMS
  • Liaising closely with the Expression Engine developer to ensure that all templates could be easily integrated into the CMS
  • Hand-coding in HTML 4.01 Transitional to a reasonable level of accessibility
  • Extensive testing of the site at all stages of the development process, ensuring complete consistency across the following browsers and platforms:
    • PC: Internet Explorer 5.01, IE5.5, IE6, IE7; Firefox, Netscape, Opera
    • Mac: Firefox, Netscape, Opera, Safari
  • Ensuring that every page and stylesheet had been validated using the W3C Markup Validation Service and that it conformed to HTML 4.01 Transitional requirements
  • Development of print stylesheets sitewide.

This was a nice straightforward set of templates, and was designed as the first of a number of interlinked sites for NZWood. The site is managed with the Expression Engine CMS, and a large part of my role (in addition to the HTML/CSS build) was to liaise closely with our EE developer to ensure that my templates worked well within Expression Engine. This was one of the first EE sites I built, and I found it very interesting to work alongside our developer, improving my understanding of the most efficient template-building techniques with the EE CMS in mind.