Development in Practice is a quarterly academic style journal from the Oxfam publications stable. In 2004 they asked us to take a fresh look at their web presence, which had been managed as a static site for the previous 4 years. Their need was for a more dynamic site which would make it easier for their small staff to keep the site updated. There was also a sense that much of the site’s content could be made easier to find for the readers and researchers using the site.
Transferring the content of site with such a big archive of static pages presented a particular challenge. But thanks to the immaculate coding used by DiP’s staff in creating the old site’s pages, we managed to write a script which automated the process of importing the archived content into a database, so that it could drive the new dynamic site.
We built the site using ActionApps, and constructed a deceptively simple navigation for what is an elaborately structured academic journal.
Graphic design for web pages was developed by Josh King-Farlow and follows his standard practice of using a fluid layout coding technique (percentage based layout as opposed to em or fixed width pixels), allowing the page to shrink and expand to fit whichever screen size you are using. Coding is also strictly W3C standards compliant.
