Buttons or Links

The website advertising La Matha (www.la-matha.com) has served us well since I set it up in 2008.  It was created in a simple way using a free development tool called NVU.  There was nothing fancy about it - pages made up of tables with text and pictures in, and the menu merely comprising a list of links to the different pages.  A recent upgrade was the new picture gallery in HTML5 (see post "Is this flash, or not").

Things have moved on since 2008.  I no longer use NVU, but BlueGriffon - basically the same, but brought into the Mozilla family with Firefox and Thundebird.  That software is still simple - there is WYSIWYG functionality as well as pure HTML scripting, but again, no gimmicks.  For another website, I have been using Coffee Cup Visual Site Designer which does allow some gimmicks, but is a bit restricting for what we want at La Matha.  However, I have been able to copy some functionality from that software through to BlueGriffon - buttons!

Using this, I have replaced the simple menu with a series of buttons which change colour when the mouse goes over them.  In order to make this more organised, I have grouped the pages together a bit better - the Local Area pages were already grouped, but the House now has Pictures, Guestbook, Location and Activities under it.

I hope this makes the site look a bit better, and less amateurish: it probably still is that, but it at least gets the message across.  The old format is still alive and well on the french version.