Poland 2008 site design stuff
Ruth's Poland site is now live. The phpFormGenerator came in handy - the one I was using for the Clanen site didn't have a capcha so now there is less chance of spam. The designers toolbox is also pretty useful. I couldn't decide which type of navigation to use but I ended up with going with this one. I really wanted a slider but I'll use that idea for the next site that I work on. Like so many pretty things many slider menus are a bit traumatic on a 56k model (and given the geographical scope of the site it's not such a good idea to expect broadband in every home).
I love the AJAX slideshow even though it was slightly quirky when I integrated it into my code. There were many AJAX adornments to look at but I decided that they really weren't needed in this situation. I think that the slideshow is a good compromise between usefulness and prettiness.
For the overall site design there were so many CSS template sites to choose from (Little boxes, intensivstation, mycelly and CSS Tinderbox to name but a few) that I was so overwhelmed by the choice (and lack of what I really wanted) that I ended up building the site up from an old tutorial from Netmag.
Ruth's site (which I'm sure will evolve significantly over the next 12 months) is a sub site of the Borders Exploration Group - be careful though... their site breaks Firefox! Maybe it's time for a CMS!