For those of you that are interested, this website was hand coded using an HTML text editor called HomeSite which colour codes the HTML tags. It's pretty pre-historic(!) but it works for me.
If I want to change the HTML header code in one page, I have to do a search and replace across all the pages in the site to reflect changes site-wide. I'm sure there's tools out there that do this more efficiently, but I'm a very disciplined webmaster so I rarely need to do such things!
As far as the design goes, I made sure the colours were identical to the Girl Guides site and drafted a few basic designs for Brown Owl. She picked this one becuase it flows very simply and is easy on the eye.
All the graphics were designed in PaintShop Pro. Here's a few of them:
The roll-over menu items were done in CSS. Assuming you are still interested, here's the code for the roll-over / hover part:
a.button:hover
{
font-size:14px;
padding-left:7;
padding-top:2;
padding-bottom:2;
font-family: 'comic sans ms', Verdana;
font-weight:bold;
text-align:left;
text-decoration:none;
background-color:#66CBFE;
width:113px;
color:#C7178C;
}
The site took about 10 hours of design about to fix the basic idea, another 5 hours to get the template working in HTML and then another 20 hours or so of editing and mucking about to complete and finally upload in the state you see now. At commercial rates, this site would cost around £3,000 but the Brown Owl is pretty cute - so we gave it away for free!
Want to know more about me? See The Author.
