Andrea Cima Serniotti - A brilliant blog about web design and development

Overview

Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSI) is the national mapping agency of the Republic of Ireland. Their primary product is mapping services. They produce a very comprehensive range of urban, rural, tourist and leisure maps at a variety of scales. These maps are produced in digital form as well as on paper. The base data used to create the map series is also used to produce other products such as aerial photography and digital terrain models.
Award winning website in the Golden Spiders 2008, the OSI site is still very modern, but required some work in the education section. In this part of their website they try to help children and adults learn and understand mapping through an easily explained and fun process. A particular look and feel and content organization were necessary to suit this specific audience.

The idea was to differentiate the look and feel of this area from the rest of the site, while keeping some sort of consistency throughout it. We decided to keep the same header and top menu for consistency and to totally change the main content area and the left hand navigation system.

I opted for an orange palette to style the generic pages like the overview, copyright, FAQs and contacts, a green one for the Primary School section, red for Secondary School and Blue for Third Level & Academic.

As I said, the design was thought to suit the specific target. Big and bright icons with almost no text for the Primary School section, slightly smaller icons and some simple text for Secondary School and standard icons and imagery with more textual information in the Academic Level area.

I personally designed the orange generic look and feel, the Primary School and the Third Level & Academic ones. I developed the XHTML and CSS of the whole thing and implemented it in the Arekibo ASP based CMS.

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Service

• Design
• Web Development XHTML/CSS
• IMS customization
• Cross-browser Testing