About This Website
This site was designed, constructed and modified by Nicholas Kingston.
This site is currently updated by Nicholas Kingston and Walter de la Cruz.
About This Site
Dynamotive Energy Systems Corporation is a renewable energy firm. When commissioned to build the website, the firm wanted the site to reflect what the firm does, and provide an easy to manipulate interface for both the viewer and the administrator. Keeping with the firms "clean" ideology, a site with a simple yet effective design was required.
Design
Since an energy site relies more on the content they provide rather than images as a whole, sufficient space had to be created to allow for all this information to appear eye pleasing and easy to read. The use of the dividers in the design allow for an easy distinction between different aspects of the site. These include the grey underline underneath each section, the green coloured heading such as the one above, and the section title with the company's tricolour standard.
Technology
Each page of this website was originally coded by hand to ensure browser compatibility and clutter free pages that load quickly and efficiently. The site was developed through the use of CSS along with standard HTML. CSS allows the site to maintain a uniform appearance, and should a change be needed, the code is stored in an external file which links to every page allowing for easy manipulation and quick loading time since no images are required in the site template. The use of div tags (Divider Tags) allow for flexible designs not capable with tables therefore creating a more dynamic site that is aesthetically pleasing and easier to manage. The use of CSS allows the administrator of the site to be able to add features to the page such as an image with relative ease since all qualities for objects have been defined and are told how to react by the external CSS file.
Other coding used include SSI (Server Side Includes), RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Flash Animations / Action scripts.
In order to ensure parts of the page that are identical throughout the site, SSI allows the administrator to divide the page into frames of code invisible to the end reader. This allows the same fragments of code to be used throughout the site therefore any change made on one page is made on every page.
The recent increase in RSS News feeds has been accounted for by the Dynamotive Website. RSS is an XML-based format for websites to summarize content, such as news articles, and deliver headlines, descriptions, and links for easy access to the information you want most. The information is delivered through a "feed." The feeds are collected by an RSS newsreader application.
For ease of use, the Dynamotive Photo Album was constructed using a combination of Flash, Action script and XML. This allows the administrator to add images with ease by modifying an XML file rather than creating individual pages for each image.
Conclusion
The Dynamotive Website conforms to W3C Standards for XHTML and CSS. The website employs the rapidly changing web environments to its advantage ensuring that the most information can be transmitted to the end viewer.
