Client: Soothe UR Soul
Launched: Spring 2004
View: No longer available
State: Has since been redesigned
Following the completion of his personal site, DJ Chris-Style asked for the creation of a second web site. The purpose of the second site is to promote a monthly party in San Francisco called Soothe UR Soul. The site would be somewhat tied to the look of the chris-style.com site, yet still have its own distinct look.
Taking a lead from the name, the visual design reflects the cool soothing nature of the music, as opposed to the red-hot rhythms on the chris-style.com site. Additionally the site needed to be easy to manage, so I again used traditional server-side includes to house the repeated content, since the host didn't support server-side scripting like PHP.
Unlike the site for chris-style.com, this site uses web standards such as XHTML, CSS and semantic markup, which means the longevity of the site will be much greater, and with the addition of alternate style sheets the site could easily be viewed on a PDA or web-enabled cell phone. Additionally, by using standards-based design, the development time was reduced, and the difficulty of site maintenance or even redesign was eased as well.
The other major reason for adopting a CSS approach to the overall layout is the reduction in the amount of code within the page. Not only does this make it easier to develop, but more importantly the ratio of content text to structural markup is significantly higher which results in far better search engine placement, which is something everyone wants to achieve.
In general this project is a good example of how standards-based design and implementation benefits both the developer and the client.
