Rent My Flat in Feodosia website redesign up
About a week ago we released the updated Rentmyflatinfeodosia.com website on the world. The website is a very simple site, introducing a rental apartment in the Crimean city of Feodosia.
Feodosia is in the Crimea which is a part of the Ukraine. I must say that when I started working on the site I knew nothing about the area. Of the Ukraine, my image was of heavily moustached ex-Soviet weight lifting women (I may be confusing Bulgaria there though) and the Chernobyl tragedy.
Regarding the Crimea my image was of a playground for Russian intelligentsia and nobility on the Black Sea and the exchange of poems between the lawnpoet Tennyson who wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Rudyard Kipling’s Baxteresque response The Last of the Light Brigade.
As I found out while working on the site, the region has a very long and fascinating history. Feodosia, where the apartment is located, was founded back in the 6th century B.C. under the name of Theodosia, by Greek settlers from Miletus. This settlement was destroyed by the Huns in the 4th century AD and then again by the Mongols in the 1230’s. Around this time it was controlled by the Venetians and then by the rival doge state of Genoa. At this point it was known as Caffa.
In 1475 the city was seized by the Turks and renamed Kefe. As part of the Ottoman empire Kefe became one of the most important Turkish ports on the Black Sea. Turkish control lasted until 1783 when the expanding Russian empire conquered the Crimea. The city was renamed Feodosiya in 1802 – a Slavic interpretation of the ancient Greek name.
The city remained part of Russia until World War II when it was twice captured by Nazi Germany forces. In 1954 it came under the administrative control of the Ukrainian SSR along with the rest of Crimea.
Today Feodosia is a popular resort town on the Black Sea. Highlights include museums to the painter Ivan Aivazovsky, the poet, painter and philosopher Maximillian Voloshin, as well as the Soviet Social Realism writer Alexander Green. Feodosia is also close to the town of Koktebel – location of the largest nudist beach in the former Soviet Union!
I met the owner of the apartment when we were staying in Istanbul. He was asking around for who knew about search engine optimisation for his website. We had a bit of spare time so I said sure, I know a bit about that. Did a bit of tinkering around and he was quite happy with that. He got the top position on google for the keyword Feodosia.
I didn’t like the design he had for the site. So it was quite enjoyable to work on the redesign. He has very good content – the most important thing for search engines, but the design was somewhat lacking. I wanted to make a very simple site, that was fast to load and easy to navigate. It didn’t need any funky web 2.0 bells and whistles as it is an information site. Besides, creating some sort of interactive web system would have created more work for him than was really necessary.
For the design I incorporated a lot of the principles expounded by Information Architects. I am sure the site is not as nice as Information Architects, but the ideas they expressed were very helpful. For the image galleries I used the javascript css image gallery thumbnail script solution from dynamic drive. This allowed me to keep away from using flash – I think using flash is one of the biggest mistakes a person can make when designing a web site. Flash does have its uses – Eyezmaze being a great example, but for ordinary websites it is overkill, making sites sluggish and frustrating as well as being incomprehensible to screen readers and almost as bad for search engines.
All in all a very rewarding experience. Check out the Rent my flat in Feodosia website. Some images are not safe for work (NSFW) – thanks largely to that nudist beach near Koktebel. I haven’t been able to check the site on Internet Explorer so any feedback about that, or feedback about the site in general would be greatly appreciated.
4 Comments, Comment or Ping
elliott
i’m with you on the flash. can be useful (museum sites seem to use it best), but often it is just clunky and slow. also, my office still uses Mac 9.0 or something ridiculous, which means any pages with excessive flash bits and bobs and java script is rendered unreadable. think of the poor man!
Feb 2nd, 2007
bitshifter
Works fine in IE 7.0. The only thing is the image thumbnails look a bit stretched. Some of the images have a different aspect ratio to the thumbnail size and browsers don’t do a great job of resizing images. You could make separate thumbnails but that’s a bit of a pain. No biggie.
We’re moving house today!
Feb 3rd, 2007
symeg
Thanks for the comments.
elliot: Chooch is still using OS9 – she says she prefers it to OS10, so she has problems viewing a lot of sites. She also said that on Mixi there is an OS 9.0 group with about 1200 members, so there must be quite a few people in Japan still using OS 9.0. There are apparently also still people using Mac OS’s as old as Mac OS 7.6. So I quite agree with you.
bitshifter: Thanks for checking it out. I have been thinking about getting a windows box, but just to check the odd site doesn’t really seem worth it. Will have a play round and make some thumbnails – although I have to work with the images I have. Hope the move goes well! Looking forward to seeing some pix of you settled into the valley and chilling!
Feb 3rd, 2007
elliott
Gotta just say, maybe i’m not viewing complicated sites with lots of Japanese kanji embedded in the script but i’ve never had any problems viewing any sites that I can recall in OS10. That said, i’ve never been a fan of windows-esque interfaces and have always preferred older directory-style interfaces such as OS9 and pre-Windows 98 (i think windows 95 was user-friendly but I’m struggling to remember more than a decade ago!) Those older style setups helped users understand the way the systems worked a lot better, meaning users could learn to work their way around certain problems should they arise. My biggest gripe with new setups such as OS10 and i’m guessing the new Vista is simply that users are forced to head down certain directions when dealing with certain files and they don’t have the flexibility to deal with problem files in other manners. Basically, you just get left with a “This is not a recognized Photoshop document”-type notice and you have to jump through numerous hoops to get around the prob. In the old days, in some instances you could just change the suffix! Will check out the Mixi sites…
Feb 4th, 2007
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