A new auction site for South Africa

The past few weeks we've been quite busy with the re-design of a new online auction website.

Our client has been busy with this project for about 4 years now, and it just doesn't seem to get done. Until now.

After spending a small fortune to date, finances were becoming an issue, and rather than start from scratch with a totally new design approach in .php (instead of the existing half-hearted .asp), we scratched around a bit, and came across WeBid, amongst a few others which are not getting mentioned. A fair amount of time went into the script selection, as it is imperative that whatever is used, needs to work properly. What tilted the scales for us in favour of WeBid is the fact that although still in Beta, there are several sites running with no hassles, and then of course, the support forum is active, and helpful.

We took a screenshot of the existing site, which was designed for 800px width monitors, and widened it to 990px, in line with the major auction sites. Some surgery to the basic design followed, chopping and widening, importing graphics to the new theme, creating graphics for the new theme, and then the painful bit started.

The WeBid default theme was the starting point, as it has all the pages needed. There are 61 files there that need to be tarted and tittivated, and bent out of and into shape to fit into the design parameters of the new theme. A major part of the website design process was in converting the original table based design into a css based design, for forward browser compatability, smaller file load sizes, and to keep the hidden parts of the design lean, mean, and Search Engine Friendly.

The bulk of the work is done, and we need to add one or three items into the website coding. We'll be loading the test site to our servers later this evening, so, if you have any comments or ideas, please feel free to let us know.