After weeks of writing new posts about everything I was learning and doing, the wife’s site has finally launched! Please visit it and let us know what you think. We are very excited!
We had several things that were important to both of us in the development. See below.
| Deran’s List | Amy’s List |
|
|
As you can see below, the site is VERY clean.
I hope you’ve read my previous posts and you believe that I used best practices. If not, please let me know because I will absolutely redo some things. I definitely learned A LOT during the process in particular, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, & StructureMap. Amy thinks the site is easy to update…at least the pictures! Everything else is static XHTML and I know she’ll make me update that text, but it rarely changes.
I think I’ve made it as accessible as I know how. All the images have alt tags, the links have titles, access keys are all in place (including the standard 1,2,3,4), skip navigation is there, all forms have fieldsets & labels, and it’s all laid out with CSS. If I am missing ANY accessibility things, PLEASE let me know because that is VERY important to me.
I tried to make it friendly, I set the textbox focus where necessary, I have friendly messages like “Oops! Invalid email address.”, there are messages for just about everything, the textboxes change colors when invalid, the URLs are VERY friendly, so I think that goal was met.
The code is probably some of the cleanest and most maintainable code I’ve written in a LONG time. So no worries there.
The navigation is VERY straight-forward. Categorized at the top of the page and then you have the standard links at the bottom. Simple!
I kept version control with GIT and it’s backed up to my WHS nightly.
I’ve run the site through YSlow and optimized as much as possible.
I’ve encrypted the web.config settings, turned off debug, and enabled customErrors. I think it’s done! Yay :)
Warning…vent session here:
In case any of you are wondering what I laid the site out with, I used Fireworks 8. Fireworks 8 is single-handedly the BEST Web layout tool ever…then Adobe bought it and turned it into a bloated piece of crap like the rest of their software. Just my opinion, but Fireworks was built to be a Web layout tool and that is EXACTLY what it does…nothing more…nothing less. I love it!
Thanks for reading and PLEASE give us your feedback on her new site!
Related Posts:
- Project structure posted as ASP.NET MVC Solution Structure
- Join Mailing List Feature posted as jQuery AJAX with ASP.NET MVC, Learning Fluent NHibernate, and Change Default TextBox Value with jQuery
- Portfolio implementation posted as Beauty of Interfaces and Refactoring my MVC & Photo Repository
- Encoding email address on contact page as Trick Bots from Stealing Email Address with jQuery
- IoC implementation posted as StructureMap Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3
- Friendly URL feature posted as ASP.NET MVC – Understanding Routes
- CSS posted as CSS – It’s been a while old friend
