Encyclopaedia Manchester United

My mate Mark is a huge Manchester United fan and something of a stats nerd; which is something I would never have pegged him as when we were younger. Anyway, he has been running a website for about 10 years now and had recently decided it needed sprucing up.

We've sat down a few times together over the last couple of months and had come to a decision to transfer all the content over into Movable Type from Frontpage. However, after I'd transferred about ½ of the content we re-evaluated and came to the decision that Movable Type was really not suitable for the task. After further delving with Frontpage we've came up with a really elegant solution that uses more of Frontpage's core features.

The site did have a sort of uniformed design already; a header, footer, left sidebar and a right sidebar on most of the pages. The rest of the pages just had the header, footer and left sidebar. However, all the pages used inline frames for the header, footer and sidebars.

Mark has spent most of this week playing with Frontpage and has managed to come up with a set of templates that can be assigned to the entire site. The beauty of the system is that Frontpage will update all attached pages if he updates the templates. The test pages he had uploaded looked good but for one or two niggles. I've been up there this evening and have modified the templates to give them a more fluid ability. The newly updated test pages now display great at any resolution of 1024x768 or higher. Previously the right-hand sidebar had expanded to take up all the remaining screen width. Now, the entire page dynamically resizes to take advantage of the extra screen width.

An added advantage is that rather than the updating process taking most of the next month or so we can get it done in only a few nights. I'm due to pop back up to have a look at something else for him next week and fully expect the site to be fully updated to the new template design.

One of the other things we were going to do was add a redirect on his old webspace to point to the new domain. Unfortunately, his old ISP has deleted the old Index pages and won't allow him to upload any files to the space. This has prevented him from installing any sort of redirect. I think the next course of action is to delete the entire site from the old webspace and hope that Google trawls the site again soon, finds no content there, and removes the entries from it's database.

Anyway, the newly relocated site can be found here.