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Introduction

Example Image

So this is my entry for the oswd web design template competition. I am now going to bore you with filler text that isn't really worth reading, well, some of it is i guess, but this paragraph is kinda boring. Lets put an image in to spice things up; Wow look-a-that! It's a image! and the text floats around it, lovely jubly, whoopedee doo! I'm struggling for things to write now so I'm gonna wrap up this paragraph and let you know the next one is prolly worth reading. Oh, and here's an example link thrown in for good measure

Winter

So, I'm designing a winter template, what do i do first? I look and think about stuff that reminds me of winter. I think.

So I take all these things and try to put them together in a design template. I feel what I came up with has a cold, icy feel to it, aided primarily by the choice of background colour. The image of a leaveless tree also adds to the cold, winterness of it all. The style sheet is designed so that it could be used as a 'Winter Theme' for the web site. All the 'wintry' elements such as the icicles, snowflake bullet points, snowballs, the header image and the snowman are easily removed or changed to reveal a perfectly normal looking template. You could even save the style sheet as "winter.css" and have your web site apply it during and around the Christmas period.

css + xhtml

Of course the template validates as correct css and xhtml 4.01 transitional. This is something you don't see with many web sites but is becoming more popular thankfully. all templates / sites that i make adhere to these standards and it is something i feel strongly about. it is something that i feel everyone should be aware of, to make the internet a better place...

The design itself is based Entirely on css. Not a single table here. This means that the site will also collapse nicely should the viewer not have a browser that supports css, or for some reason the css does not load.

Sort The Code Out!

Another thing you don't often see is labels within html and css Code. It isn't hard to do and doesn't take up much time. I feel that for a project like this it is absolutely essential to put relevant labels within html and css code. So that others know what on Earth is going on within your code; even if you don't...

So, What did you use to make this?

Firstly; pen & paper, can't beat it. I drew a few designs and sketches then picked the best one. To turn paper into web site I used Notepad. Notepad for the css and notepad for the xhtml. The image at the top of the page is actually a small section of a photograph by myself, edited and cropped down in photoshop. All the other images were created in Macromedia fireworks.

This is normally where all the Copyright © information would go. Who the web site is registered to etc. All I'm going to put here now is this:

This web site was design by James Koster, January 2005 for the OSWD template design contest.
It is entire css and xhtml 4.01 valid.
Courtesy Open Web Design Thanks to web hosting bluebook