"Refresh" for my work's website.

[jonbalza]

Well, today was my last day of work at my current employer. One of the last things they had me do was to give our website a little bit of a "refresh" before I left. Well, I decided to do a couple of other things while I was in there. The goals for this redesign were:

1. Make this site easy to update. Even to the point of sacraficing some design.
2. Convert to a CSS-based layout.
3. Upgrade the graphics a little bit to make it more pleasing to the eye.
4. Change the folder structure to a more meaningful one.
5. Make it compatable in more browsers.
6. Use a print style sheet to make the printed pages look a little better.
   [/list]
   
   When I say "Make this site easy to update," some of the things I did to accomplish that are:
   1. Get rid of any extraneous graphics that could have been done with text, such has headers, little graphics on some pages, etc...
   2. Bring the HTML code down to as small a size as possible, using as few tables as possible.
   3. Use Server-side includes whenever possible so update it once, and it updates everywhere.
   4. Style photos by CSS, not by Photoshop.
      [/list]
      
      Those were the main ideas behind it. I did everything from design to live site in 13 days. I hope you like!
      
      http://www.cousinssubs.com/
      
      For comparison purposes, here's some screenshots of what the site looked like until this morning:
      
      Home Page
      State Store Listing
      Company Home
      Menu listing

 

[theKeeper]

Very nice work Jon, i really like the newer version more. :}
Looks 'tighter' if you know what i mean. :B

 

[jonbalza]

Thanks Mark, that's exactly what I was going for. There were a lot of spacing, typography, and just general consistency issues that needed cleaning up.

 

[Hatch]

Really nice job! Love the clean look. Is this page supposed to switch styles? http://www.giftchecksolutions.com/certificates.php?id=68

Nice work :} Hatch

 

[jonbalza]

Unfortunately, yeah, it is supposed to switch styles - that page is hosted off-site, and for political reasons I don't agree with, it wasn't able to be changed to the new look - what you see there is the way the site looked 2 years ago.