Finally Usable

Lecturers frustrations with old Idat websites have gone into shaping this one. Revised and tested against what the users want, Smickie.com now has a perfect information architecture.

Project, meet Journal

In a time before mastered information the de-facto projects sat divorced from the any associated journal posts.

Not any more. You no longer have to get lost backtracking for for post that should be readily available with the project, all can be found in the top link bar.

Data Decluttered

The lecturers don't care I enjoy running and have a penchant for 18th century movable type. They already know what Idat is, they teach it, they don't need to read about it. All of this unnecessary 'Look At Me!' is tided away in the info section not wasting time and real estate.

Striving for simplicity

One thing learnt from last years site is that all the projects will have their own extreme styles. The only way to present all of these styles in one place is to have that place simple, neutral and unobtrusive.

Queue the shades of blue.

My type of site

Text is not just a series of horizontal lines that need to fit into the overall design, they are the reason your here. Content is given priority, so the whole site is leaded and tracked for maximum legibility (and beauty).

Objective Adjectives

Even though theres only a small amount of data to be conveyed, a controlled vocabulary is still key (and good practice for the future). Variant terms for pages will always be avoided for the real terms; the journals a journal not a blog.

Accepted term	Variant term
Journal	Blog, Weblog, Diary
Projects	Portfolio, Work
Info	About Me, Misc, Everything Else, Links, Stuff

Web standards as standard

The site meets all the standards you'd expect from quality web programming:

- Full graceful degradation. The page is still viewable with script, images and css switched off.

- W3C valid(ish) XTML & CSS. There one or two things that don't validate, that dont matter.

- A universal visual linking language. All links, wherever they are stand out because of color and underline when rolled over. Those are the rules.

- Implemented Mod_rewrite for clean URLs.

Backstage

Behind the scenes is a robust PHP/mySQL journaling and project management engine delivering all the sites content dynamically.

Ready, Set, Final Year

So as the future slowly turns from a promise into a threat, Smickie.com is ready and set.