Though this site primarily exists to provide a means for me to display my animation work, it is itself an example of my site design and development skills as well. I built it using standards compliant xhtml and css so that it would be accessibile and cross-browser compatible now and into the future. You can validate the front-end code using the links to W3C's automated validation tool located at the bottom of every page.

Aside from accessibility, and compatibility, there are other reasons why I went with a CSS front-end. CSS tends to render faster in most browsers than using a table layout. It also separates the design elements from the content, allowing the viewer to switch to an un-styled text version of the site (at least in most browsers). From a development standpoint, CSS eases the time expense of re-designs by separating the graphic and text-formatting elements from the content. If I want to change the background color, or how text looks down the line, I change one file. The update would apply to all of my pages automatically instead of requiring me to make the same changes to every page manually.

For the sake of consistency, and ease of updating, I built a custom content management system for this site. When I fill out an add-content form, the link to the content is added to the navigation, a table is built for tracking information so that I can see how much traffic a page is getting, and the content is made accessible at it's corresponding address.

You might notice that there's no extensions or ?variable=value in the urls of the pages on my site. This technique is most commonly referred to as "pretty links", and serves several purposes. Removing the extensions provides a bit of extra security, because potential hackers would first have to find out which language the site is written in before trying attacks that would utilize it. Urls without extensions also allows me more freedom to change servers or program my site using a different middleware language, whereas if I were to have links like www.christandy.net/index.cfm then re-write my site using asp, any links to my cfm pages on other sites would no longer work. Disguising the variables as directory structure makes the pages more index-able to search engines, which often ignore variable information in urls. Most importantly to me is the factor of human-readability and retention of the addresses. It's much easier to remember www.christandy.net/portfolio/animation than www.christandy.net/portfolio?section=animation don't you think?

I must admit that I didn't write the tree menu script to the left, credit for that goes to: Anders Nawroth, and here's a link. treemenu.nornix.com. I basically tied it into my CMS and customized some graphics. I think it's working extremely well considering what a pain it is to write something like that. I'm glad I found it instead of wrote it myself.

I do hope you like my site. I'm fairly happy with the layout for the time being but there are a few more features I'm planning on adding down the line. Comments or critiques are always welcome via my contact form, and thanks for looking.