For a long time I have wanted a good looking portal page.  At first, I wanted to do something “cool”.  I was going to make a collage picture, and have parts of the site linked off that.  For my BTeC I actually started to put it together.  I was good for the course, to prove that I was able to do it and the instructor loved that it was different.  However, I wasn’t happy with it, The images did not lend themselves to a good website design, and it wasn’t intuitive.

With all that in mind. I found I had some time to go browsing the web today at lunchtime.  I came across a post called 10 Rock Solid Website Layout Examples. Whilst it didn’t have exactly what I was looking for, it did remind me of an important point “Keep it simple”.  With that in mind, I thought for a while about that I really needed, then when I came home from work set about the building a new portal page.  It’s a very simple layout, two big images that you can click and the site title.  It’s simple, yet I think it looks good.

To put the page together I decided to use Dreamweaver CS4.  I built the page from one of their templates, and then added my own extra part. The wording I wanted in the same style as I used for the logo, so those I whipped up in Photoshop CS4.  The rest of the site was taken from existing images from other parts of the site, recycled. It’s simple, yet provides everything that it needs.

I hope my visitors enjoy that entrance lobby of cjdawson.com