David Winspear has been building and restoring wooden boats using traditional methods for thirty five years. A family member had created a design using Microsoft Publisher, and they wanted it to be implemented
Publisher creates non-standard web pages (discussed previously), so I wanted to recreate the pages properly but use the work that had been done as a design brief. Here's one of the pages provided as the brief:
I don't usually use heavy textured backgrounds like this but it felt right in this instance and the photographs worked well in the Olympia site, but I didn't like the actual image that had been used (and couldn't lift it from the images provided anyway). I thought anyone involved in building boats would spot if I used a photograph of wood from my sideboard so I drove over to take a photograph of some larch which, apparently, is what's used to build boats.
The other issue with using Publisher to design websites is that Publisher is a tool created for graphic designers who are very concerned with where page elements are positioned. Lesson one day one of graphic design school is the 'put a mark on a piece of paper and feel how it changes the page dynamics' exercise. Position is everything. On the web, all of that is gone, it's like pulling the carpet from under the whole of graphic design. The point of the web is that people have the freedom to view the web using any device they wish, which means they can use any size of screen (if they use a screen at all (blind people often use a text to speech synthesizer)) and if they use a graphical browser, they can resize the window however they wish, not just changing the size, but changing the aspect ratio too. This is getting more (not less) important because the norm nowadays seems to be a widescreen display, yet more people are also using handheld devices such as mobile phones and PDAs with tiny screens. Web pages are meant to be flexible, elements are supposed to move around to suit the user's equipment.
So all the meaning attached to position on the page in the brief had to be stripped out. The arrows from the schooner to its components had to go so the page could flex and change according to its user.
Other than that, I just took the elements from the brief and re-created the pages, adding a bit of colour balance correction for some of the images.
The site took five days of elapsed time to complete, and 10 hours of actual work, requiring an investment of £550 plus £60 of costs comprising mileage and hosting.
The client said "Many thanks for all the hard work John.... Looks good!!".