week 4 progress

Work Completed:
4 weeks since project approval and there has been some good progress in design & development.

The index or home page is completed with drop down navigation working smoothly. We have set this page up for sampling on my own webspace..
Please take a look at the progress here

The biggest challenge so far has been to ensure the website is cross browser and platform supported. While it was not a client requirement to begin with we have consulted with the client and both agreed on making it cross-browser friendly to ensure the site would work across ie6-ie8 and Firefox, Safari & Chrome.

Using statistics provided on the w3 consortium we found there is still a large number of web users using ie6 (11%).

Further to this we spent awhile configuring the drop-down menu's which was something new to us. There is a javascript add-on called jquery which we used to make this work. Installing this simply meant creating source code to find the code src="Scripts/jquery-1.3.1.min.js Furthur to this i had to construct my navigation in such a way that it would work with the actual javascript code for the dropdown. This was not as easy as i thought and ended up taking up a lot more time then anticipated.

Using divs rather then tables was a good learning curve and for me and i also found that divs are much easier to organise and style using external style sheets. Photoshop allows for auto-slice and save for web but in my case as i was using css i had to manually crop and save each of the images i would use to the image folder.

Work to be completed:
There is still quite a lot of tweaking to the style of the site but overall we are just about ready to move into the deep programming side of the Content management System. (The biggest part of the project).