4SLICE Consulting, Inc.

Website Design and Build

February 2002

4SLICE was started upon the demise of the Oven Digital Boston office. Our designer, Waleed, created our first web site. The name stems from the fact that our former company was Oven, and we were the smaller high tech derivative... the 4SLICE toaster. It was a comical/clever flash layout comprised of a sandwich navigation.

Our team changed, and it was time our site did too. We decided it was important to steer away from the dot-com look and have updated content that helped our clients understand the company. Alan suggested that the style be linux/techy and that he also liked the VTVIDEOS style.

I already had a design going (the blue) that had a 3D feel to it, but I lost motivation for it. I then took what Alan suggested and came up with the other layout. Our focus was company information and portfolio, as most of these types of sites. Just like VTVIDEOS, I wanted a cut-away image at the top of the page. We took that design direction to the final layout. I made a rotating PHP script to put images of Boston, NY and other relevant locations at the top of the pages. The portfolio icons on the bottom are also randomly generated, and they include a great DHTML script to allow rollover layers to bring up a small amount of info.

The limitations of this layout: The navigation used relies on a 'top' pixel location. If the nagivation needs a new item, I have determine how many pixels to move the location up. Also, the text height for a page can't be taller than that white area since it would throw the navigation off.

I also wrote a PHP page that allows our team to add news items without my help. This feature was something I learned through Goombalooza!.

Relevant link: http://www.4slice.com

Tools used:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• Macromedia Dreamweaver
• HTML/CSS
• DHTML
• Javascript
• PHP
• MySQL