GREAT Frontier Web Site for January 12, 1998 Domainz New Zealand domain name registry.

URL: http://www.domainz.net.nz/
Company: Campus Media
Team:
HTML and Frontier code: Stephen Judd, info@campusmedia.co.nz
Graphic design: Shaun Nicolson

Stephen Judd describes the project:
Domainz is the New Zealand domain name registry, which now runs on a commercial basis.

Our task was to take Domainz' old website, remodel it, and add a lot of new information to it.

Important features were:

• the site would contain huge amounts of technical text. The client hired a technical writer to ensure a consistent and simple style, while we tried to design a very readable layout.
• download speed was very important, hence the absence of heavy graphics.
• regular users should be able to find what they wanted quickly, while new users should find things sensibly arranged.

Frontier was essential in maintaining a large glossary of links - the large amount of technical information demanded lots of hyperlinks. We made extensive use of glosssub() for this. We also employed Frontier to create the tables of contents, using a rudely hacked version of siteOutline() so that we could have items in an arbitrary but fixed order.

The client was very particular about formatting details, and Frontier was invaluable for in keeping them happy, since minor tweaks could be made to the whole site with no particular trouble. One interesting drawback to this: it was tempting to make so many incremental changes to the design as to violate the original requirements for the site!

I used BBEdit as an external text editor with Frontier.