I miss the excitement, wonder and awe that was part of the early web. I try to hide my feelings but I fondly remember those wonderful sites with “
Under Construction“ signs and flashing text to make certain you did not miss the important stuff. Annoying pop-ups and unstoppable music play came later.
Progress has now brought us unstoppable video-ads, banks using spamming techniques such as Flash pop-ups to circumvent your pop-up blocker, sites pushing for Facebook sign-on to steal your friends data, unimportant sites that requires registration in order to better track and monitor you. And then scientists wonder why people use weak passwords …
The push for applications to move into browser-land is also heavily driven by the same companies that create those browsers. If the browser has access to everything, those companies will have access too, don’t they?
The above has nothing to do with this blog. I just started the process to update our venerable old public web-site and was a bit carried away. Sorry about that.
Since I like to create the website myself, it was time to dig into the thinking processes, technologies, designs and tools that are used in modern websites. After all I am hopeless with design so I have to steal from the best. I liked our
previous website better then the
current one, so back to the drawing board.
Requirements
I had some very basic and simple requirements for the website:
- Content is our corporate information;
- Content is static;
- Look must be contemporary;
- Readable on all devices and support for screen-readers;
- It must be in HTML5 ( I know, requirements should not be based on but drive the technology choice, but hey, rules are there to be broken).
I received one complaint that there is too much text on the site now. I kind of disagree, but let’s see if something can be done about it, maybe using principles of the
Visual Understanding Environment, but that might be overkill.
Preparations
This is what I came up with.
Tell me what you think? Did I make the wrong choices? Did I miss anything? I will probably develop with the
Brackets Open-Source Code Editor.
Result
Give me a few weeks to bring everything together and then have a look at the
new Astyran website.
