Portfolio: Novations

URL:

http://www.novations.co.uk/

Description:

Novations.co.uk is the website displaying houses and flats for sale by Novations Property Services.

Technologies used:

XSLT, XHTML, CSS, php. (See below for more information.)

• Simple, tab-based navigation
• Each property listing is laid out in the style of estate agents' house listings
• The design works well with one or many houses for sale
• House listing pages are printer-friendly
• A PDF version of each house listing is available
• Feedback form for each property and on the 'contact' page

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I used to following languages and technologies in the website:

XSLT

Each page was written in a proprietary XML language then transformed into XHTML by an XSLT stylesheet. This means that the presentation code is only written once for each part of the page (for example, the sections in the house description). The presentation code and content of the website were stored separately. The XML files were processed off-line, and the resulting XHTML files uploaded to the server.

XHTML

XHTML is embedded in the stylesheet so the content can be inserted into it, and each part can be repeated as often as needed. The pages on the website, which are the XHTML created by the XSLT transformation, have been modified slightly to be valid XHTML.

CSS

CSS is used to give the visual style of the page, such as colours and fonts. A different style is defined for printing, in order to make the pages more printer-friendly.

php

php is used to handle the feedback forms. It takes what the user has entered and sends it in an email to the website's owner. If the user has entered their e-mail address, that is included as the return address so that the website's owner can use the 'reply' button to reply to them. All data submitted is checked for security threats before being used.

The Novations website has been checked against the m-bread web design accessibility policy and, as such, follows the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to AA level. This should ensure adequate accessibility for the site's target audience.

Browsers

The Novations site has been tested in the following browsers and operating systems:

• Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 on Mac OS X 10.4
• Apple Safari 3.1.2 on Mac OS X 10.4
• Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 on Windows XP
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP
• Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Windows 98
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 SP1 on Windows 98

The website has been tested to ensure it works correctly on all tested browsers. However it was optimised for Mozilla Firefox, and as such may display slightly differently in the other browsers.