Client - website building commences

Despite my client being on a two week hiatus, I have gotten hold of the server details and so began installing the Wordpress CMS.

The homepage template is up and available now. Until I get content through from Sue it's more or less the shell.

You can also visit the site, a work in progress, on this link, www.footworksbysue.co.uk

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The background image is not 100% confirmed as on larger monitors it distorts being about 1000px wide. I could remedy this in Photoshop, or alternatively I have found a few more images, which are slightly different but would add some interest to the backdrop. I'm awaiting feedback on this.

For now though, the green leaves of nature provide a fresh lift to the page and contrast nicely with the orange that is used in the main body of the site.

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Having used sIFR before, I was able to implement it this time without much trouble. The only issue I experienced was due to the custom typeface Nilland not having a bold style in the original typeface package. I have since created a strengthened version, and had to pretend that it is a different font in the configuration script. It has achieved what was sought after for the navigation links headers.

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Elsewhere, to achieve a full background image, I located a plug-in called Supersized. This proved a little more tricky.

The benefit of using this plug-in is that it forces the browser to render all of the picture, not a zoomed version as can happen when users have a lower resolution.

However, both myself and Sarah experienced trouble in that it would retain the landscape ratio of the image and force a white border, both at the top and left of the page when the browser window was resized. After an hours testing, it whittled down to swapping the advised 'absolute' position with 'fixed' for the big background image.

Having researched into it a bit, "a fixed position element is positioned relative to the viewport, or the browser window itself." (CSS Tricks) Obviously this is what we were after, rather than absolute which "allows you to literally place any page element exactly where you want it".

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So far so good. Once my client returns from her two weeks of exams I will be able to collect some content and start forming the site.

Obviously being a CMS, I will eventually need to create a user manual to allow her to operate the site herself.

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