ABOUT FROT DESIGN

A BRIEF HISTORY

Deb Gully and Ian Gregson first designed a website for Cycle Services in 1998 - the original site is still online and pretty much the same as it ever was. We like purple. Despite being designed in 24 hours from a "Frontpage in 24 Hours" kind of book, it encompassed many cool things and was very popular in it's day. If it hurts your eyes buy some shades.

From 2000-2002 we designed and maintained sites for a number of clients, but from 2002 onwards we moved away from website work to pursue other interests. Some of our old client sites are still online, regularly updated and maintained, but pretty much as we left them eight years ago, which is very cool.

Now www.frot.co.nz is just a portal to our own sites that we keep on our server. We don't do sites for clients any more - to tell the truth we are pretty slack about updating our own webpages and have over 250 pages that need a good tidy up - please get in touch if you are a better webmaster than we are and willing to work for organic dairy products or cod liver oil...

DESIGN PHILOSOPHY

Despite being relics from another century, it never hurts to have an opinion.

PICTURES - More is more - back in the 90's when people used dial up connections we had to limit the amount of pictures we used per page to keep the pages loading, but now pictures load so fast there's no reason not to have dozens of them on every page. And decent sizes too - why piss about with puny little images and thumbnails? - google images is the new google.

SIMPLICITY - Ideally a four letter one syllable domain name (like "frot"), no frames, simple logical menus, ideas distilled down to the most important concept and expressed in images or short words and sentences, with nothing that loads up slowly, like flash, because waiting is boring. (admittedly we did one once, but at least it loads pretty quick)

In fact nothing good comes of things that move about at all, including drop down menus, because they bugger up easy navigation.

COLOURS - the more primary and vivid the better because a white background with black font might as well be a book, and grey sucks the very life out of peoples minds.

In a world in which many people are afraid to express themselves with colour, there is no reason why the internet has to blend in. Whatever colours you choose someone will hate them - unless you choose grey of course, nobody hates grey....

DO IT YOURSELF - Sometimes it's worth paying someone else to sort out your site - but like almost all things, web design has grown into a giant and mysterious subject dominated by "experts" - thankfully blogs have done a lot to reverse that.

99% of the time no knowledge of "code" (html) is required at all to make a fully functional website. It's not that hard, and very few people other than web geeks take much notice anyway - it either works or it doesn't

GAPS - each idea benefits from being separated by a space - an entire paragraph in one go is far to many words for a person running in information overload mode. Often any more than three lines of text without a space is overload. Time for a picture!

WHAT IS FROT?

We do get asked this from time to time, and notice that some people are afraid to even utter the word. Maybe they think it means something pervy or deviant. Well actually...