Valley Communications Systems, Inc.

Website Design and Build

May 2002

Valley Communications, supplier of audio/visual, presentation, security and networking equipment and service in the New England area, was another project to come to 4SLICE via Media Masters. The project called for a CMS-backed web site to allow for the addition of products to the appropriate sections. My role was to manage and alter the original designs created by Curious Ideas, as well as build the navigation and page templates.

After receiving the original files, all design changes and discussions with the client were done through Media Masters. The major difficulty was to alter designs and backgrounds where the needed layers were not fully present. Valley requested a new background (a 3D image of a client-related building with an image of a school bus and flag). To add to the difficulty, the overall design was round, making cropping a challenge. After some changes, the home page icons were in a planetary orbit around the larger circular design. The new background was put into place, and each subsection became color coordinated to the icons at the top of the page. The minor difficulty was choosing a font color for the navigation that would work on all the page colors.

Since the launch, Valley has taken apart the site and altered images without the source files, which has since, I believe, lowered the quality of the site.

Relevant link: http://www.valleycommunications.com

Tools used:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• Macromedia Dreamweaver
• HTML/CSS
• DHTML