The first website I got paid for. I designed and built a complete redesign of the company website for Childs Automotive, a full-service auto repair shop in Saratoga Springs, NY. The previous site had been built by someone else in Microsoft FrontPage 5.0 — I ported the content over and created a new design from scratch using Macromedia Fireworks MX and Dreamweaver MX.
The site launched in August 2002 and featured image-based navigation with rollover effects, a staff directory with ASE certifications, a photo gallery of customer cars, a racing sponsorship page for Stock Car Team #36, and an affiliate links section. The entire layout was a single Fireworks PNG exported as a sliced GIF table — the signature workflow of the era.
Shockingly, it still renders pixel perfect in a modern browser today.
How It Was Built
The design was created as a comp in Fireworks MX, then exported using Fireworks’ “Export to Dreamweaver” feature, which sliced the design into GIF images and generated an HTML table to reassemble them. Dreamweaver MX was used to wire up the navigation, content frames, and JavaScript behaviors.
The site used an 800px fixed-width table layout with an iframe for content
pages. Navigation used Dreamweaver’s built-in MM_swapImage() functions for
rollover effects, with all button states preloaded on page load. Popup windows
handled the map and site requirements pages.
Tools: Macromedia Fireworks MX, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX