Design

Gedling's website has been designed using a number of web technologies, techniques, and guidelines. On this page we hope to explain why the web site behaves exactly as it does and the reasons behind our choices.

Terminology

Before continuing we need to explain a couple of the terms that are used on this page and why these terms are important.

• Presentation
  

  Presentation includes the positioning, size, style, and colour of text, and the use and positioning of any graphics that portray, for example logos and buttons.
  
  Many organisations across the world insist that their web pages look just like their corporate printed literature. Or insist that everything be designed using graphics rather than text. This may result in a fantastic looking website but unfortunately alienates a large proportion of the population that are visually impaired, or do not have or cannot afford the technologies needed to display these masterpieces.
  
  

• Content
  

  Content is the most important part of a web page. It is the text that makes up the articles that you the reader are interested in. Take away the content and the flashy graphics become meaningless.

Guidelines

All government websites are expected to conform to a set of Government guidelines. In addition, Gedling Borough Council have also taken into account advice from bodies such as the RNIB in order to make our website accessible to the visually impaired.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

CSS is a web technique that enables a web designer to separate the content of a the web page from the presentation of the web page. This is useful because aspects of presentation such as font type, colour and size that may previously have been unchangeable can now be changed very easily by the web designer and even by you the reader by adjusting your browser settings or by creating your own style sheet.

Fluid Rather Than Static Design

If you adjust the size of your browser or your screen resolution you will see that the text on this page will redraw itself to fit your resized window. The text very rarely disappears off the right hand side of the screen like it does on many websites. By allowing a page to scale in this way we can ensure that the reader is the only one that determines many important aspects of the web page like:

• the readability of the content (characters per line)
• the ability to print pages regardless of the window size
• the bandwidth constraints (since our design favours text rather than graphics)
• and compatibility (our web pages can be viewed on virtually any technology -including palm-top browsers).

Gedling Borough Council are confident that anyone should be able to read the content of our pages even if the particular technology that you are using does not fully support our particular design choices.

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