Just before my departure to Rio de Janeiro for the Christmas Holiday’s I launched a new design on the Silicon Palms website and this Blog. In both cases I went for the less is more philosophy.
With the Blog I was a little more limited because of the complexities of designing for Movable Type (blog software), it’s easier to modify styles from available sources to suit the website. As for the main site, I’d been looking for several months at various ideas, color combinations and layouts, trying to find something suitable. My main criteria was that it needed to be simple.
The new design on the site is a modification of a free template from the Open Source Web Design portal. The pages are compliant to the strictest XHTML standards and feature CSS layout with simple but efficient mouse-over navigation systems. All the pages were switched from the old HTM to PHP (type) pages, so that dynamic content could be added later (if desired).
There are some utilities that I’m considering adding in the future, such as a quote engine, which is a database driven collection of comments written by customers of Silicon Palms. These short quotes will be displayed in the page header and change every time the page is refreshed. There will not likely ever be any advertising on the site or the Blog, despite the fact that there’s enough traffic to generate some ad-revenue, just prefer to leave the site as an electronic brochure.
Another new feature is the Marketing directory, which is one of my favorite parts of the site. I installed some open-source code to pull-in the content from DMOZ specific to Internet Marketing, so to the uninformed visitor it looks as though Silicon Palms has aggregated a large directory of links, actually this resource is very useful to the visitor and also to me.
By sticking with simple colors on a very basic layout it’s my hope that the Silicon Palms design will last for many years without needing another overhaul.
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