Dan Hilton

With the eponymous growth of so called “micro”-blogging services like twitter and Jaiku, so everything these days on the web is either getting smaller or bigger. Recently I had to build a site for my girlfriend, a little site that showcased her work as freelance writer and took a feed from her blog. Now I could have built about five html pages, a mini cms using smarty or some other framework. Yet they all seemed overkill for what is basically brochureware with an emphasis on the design rather than anything else.

So I reached for my jquery and set to work building a single page picosite. I used a tabs plugin to create an array of divs that served as the different aspects of the site. I also used the ajax built into jquery to pull a locally cached version of her last blog entry. I could have used a php include but thought it would be interesting to use the ajax.

I started with a photoshop mock-up, taking inspiration from Laura’s many notepads and subbing books she still has from Uni. Working with the tabs made this a natural choice. Having assembled the graphical assets and worked out my basic structure, I started coding the html and css. I mixed a google analytics account so she can see who is viewing her site and also did some basic seo work on making sure the main search engines knew of her new site.

In all I’m quietly pleased with the site, to see for yourself click here: http://www.laurabarnhouse.com/