Case Study - SpaBathroomsAndTiles.co.uk
Project
Website Re-design
About Spa Bathrooms
Spa Bathrooms is a local based business specialising in the sale and fitting of bathroom suites and tiles.
The company wanted a simple information based website to showcase their work. They had contracted a local website design firm to throw up a landing page.
However upon closer inspection it was found that the design firm was using outdated methods, which ultimately negatively impacted site speed and usability.
Outline for the Updated Website
- The company had a lot of input on the style side of the website and wanted the new site to retain many of the original design features
- It was clear that a full code re-write was necessary as although the HTML present was functional it did not adhere to current XHTML standards. This was also true for the incorporated CSS styles
- Finally to increase site performance image optimisation needs to be tackled, as this was having the biggest impact upon site speed
The Solution
The first step was to re-write the HTML code. Originally the site had been written to conform to a HTML 3.2 specification using a lot of style attributes now deprecated in the current HTML and XHTML standardisations.
To retain the style of the website it was easier to start from scratch rather than to modify the original. This way an exact duplicate of the original site could be created. Although instead of HTML attributes and inline CSS styles all styles were written into an external style sheet.
Using an external style sheet reduces the amount of code that needs to be written, makes styles consistent site wide and allows easy future style changes.
To cut down site size all images were first passed through an image compression utility.
The Spa Bathrooms website also uses quite a few gradients in the form of images for button backgrounds and site styling. The gradient images were cut down to thin strips then tiled as background using CSS styling to reduce overall memory usage but deliver the same unified design.
Result
The result is a website that retains all original and desired design features whilst being faster, standards compliant and much easier to edit.
