External Links Bar:

oswd  -   w3.org  -   w3 schools 

s y m p h o n y



Left Hand Side Navigation and Information Bar:

Extra Message
Use this for your extra messages.
Counter?
If you have a counter and are, like me, insistent on showing it off, stick it here.



Right hand side information bar:

Last Updates
23-Dec-04
Design tidyed up and finished. Submitted to OSWD for approval.

21-Dec-04
I've come back to this design after a long break, and improved many areas.

10-Nov-04
Spark in brain thinks up this web design.
News
Want proper news? Go to bbc.co.uk.
Tip of the Day
Don't stare at the PC screen for hours at a time!



Main page content starts here

welcome

Hello and welcome to my I think 4th design for OSWD. It's loosely based on my previous design, Altitude, although with the addition of the RHS bar.

Some credits etc: at some points I've become slightly stuck when IE comes up with stupid, niggly little problems that drive my crazy. I am therefore reciprocally crediting Linus' Blue Tranquility 2 for helping with the problem of the content div disappearing when the screen size goes below 800x600. Haran's Sinorca, as ever, also deserves a mention for the sub-nav system.

I anticipate this site being used for business purposes, mainly because of the extensive navigation facilities available but also because it is quite formal. I anticipate that many users will use the navigation on the side bars for main navigation, rather than page navigation as I have shown here.

If you use this template, could you please leave the notice at the top of the script about the design, as well as the item in the footer. It would also be great if you could email me your site's URL. Thank you!

about the scripting

This website is scripted in XHTML 1.0 Strict. I've used CSS 2 to define all the styles.

One of the most interesting features of this website is that it is tableless. After a long struggle, the RHS bar now works correctly all the time, something that I have previously found very difficult to achieve without reverting back to tables.

The coding is quite logical to update etc (at least to my mind!), with the built in styles used wherever possible as opposed to creating loads and loads of new classes.

accessibility

Symphony works with IE, Mozilla Firefox v1 and Opera 7.53. In Opera, title font sizes appear quite small but you alter this if you wished.

Symphony has been designed to flow logically, although to date I haven't checked it against any standards. I have included additional features, such as tags within the page that will display if CSS is turned off, and to indicate to non-visual agents what section is which. This is partly helped by the built-in heading tags.

stylesheets

Symphony uses the one stylesheet for screen display, style-screen.css. Because of the complexity of certain global styles, you will see in the stylesheet that I have created some definitions that enable you to change certain key style elements which take effect across the entire website.

Also included is a print stylesheet, style-print.css. This renders the page without the side bars when printed. However, if you include this with your website, please ensure that you tell your users in some way why certain elements have disappeared! I also suggest that you check it out for yourself before including it, so that you can see whether or not it is suitable for your purposes.
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