Our Holding Page Is Live!

Development of the actual site is progressing really well now, so we thought it's about time to make our holding page live so people can get a little more insight into what we are all about until the big day.

The temporary page features links to all of our social networks, including our facebook and twitter page and even a place to sign up for the exciting launch day announcement, you could be some of the first to join us!

Please feel free to have a poke around and we would love to hear your feedback, thanks!

James Walker

Founder

EcoForecourt.com

How To Design Your Twitter Background - Eco Style

We decided to feature this post as setting up a descent background for our twitter profile has been harder than it first seems and so we wanted to share it with you guys just in case you were scratching your heads too!

Even though we have had our twitter page set up for a little while now, this was mostly to register our name and get in the twitosphere as soon as possible. I decided now was the time to bling up our page with a purposeful twitter background that was both informative and aesthetically pleasing. The trickiest element of designing the page is getting the sizing right. This isn't because you dont know what size to make it, it's finding the optimum size which will display your background on all monitor sizes without hiding your content thats the problem.

As twitter gets displayed on different size screens the content column fluctuates in it's location which can often hide elements of your design, some of which might be important information. Very annoying! In an ideal world you need your content on the left of your background to be visible on a 15" laptop screen up to a 30" desktop monitor and everything in between.

By starting your design with a panel 250x1000 (tall and thin) everything you want people to be abel to see must fit within here and be located at the far left of your canvas. By constraining all of the important info in here, it will allow for people with 15" monitors upwards to view your juicy content. This is pretty much the most important thing to consider when designing your page. After you have accommodated this space into your design you are free to go wild with the rest of your content.

Here is our twitter background for a little bit of inspiration...

Our Website Development Progress 5 - The Holding Page

Time is flying by! It's been around 6 weeks since we started development of EcoForecourt and now the nitty gritty hardcore coding work is taking place. Until recently things have been relatively hands on for us in terms of liaising with the designers and making decisions on usability, structure and layout etc. As the look and feel of the site has been finalised, work on the CMS (Content Management System) is now being carried out which, among other things, involves linking up all the necessary components of the site that will be editable by admin and putting together a profile layout and control for users of the site. In the mean time then, and seeing as we at EF are not coders, we have been putting together a holding page that will be live very soon over at www.EcoForecourt.com. A holding page I hear you say? Don't underestimate the power of the holding page! It will be the hub of all pre-launch activity, detailing what the site is all about, what we stand for and how to keep up to date on our progress, it also includes the all important count down timer! Once our domain name is hosted on our own servers the holding page will go live and be announced! Just as a side note and on the off-chance any of you are interested, it takes up to 60 days to transfer a '.com' domain name after registering it so thats what we are waiting for. It should be any day now so stay tuned!

Technorati Verification!

Hello Technorati here is our verification code MYPCTQSNR8VQ

Many thanks!

Our Website Development Progress 4 - News

News section added! In addition to our Daily Thoughts blog and as one of the primary features of the site, EcoForecourt has a fully fledged News section where by the latest updates and reviews from the eco world of motoring will be featured on a daily basis. Among others, I shall be a contributor to the news pages but we will also be on the look out for young, budding journalist talent who are looking for great experience in writing for a professional website on one of the most in vogue topics of our time; the future of motoring.

We will be making an official announcement about this soon so stay tuned if you are interested in writing for us!

EcoForecourt.com vs World Cup

So it looks like the launch of EcoForecourt.com will probably coincide with the most popular sporting event of the decade - The World Cup. So it's probably wise for us not to try and grab attention during the intense football action when everyone will only be glued to the TV and be in pubs across the land thinking about goals and beer. We'll keep you posted but expect an EcoForecourt.com holding page to be up and running any time now!

Our Website development progress 3

Another week has passed and development is moving along swiftly - The look and feel is finalised and the design has been cut up into working HTML that I have been messing with for the past few days trying to figure out if anything needs tweaking, changing or is simply spot on! I want to show the world already but we just aren't quite there yet! We are waiting for the functionality of the site to be fully in place first and thne demo's will be going out to the press and you will get to see screen shots then! We have some really cool features, one that is given away by the screen shot up there) that we are excited to share with everyone and cant wait for your feedback! Stay tuned EcoForecourt.com is nearly here!

Our website development progress 2

Once you have a seen a wire frame they all pretty much look the same so we won't bore you with any more grey lines - every other primary page for the site was laid out this way and sub pages that can be easily replicated in the future will follow the same format just with different content in them. So the task at hand recently has been to design the look and feel of the site. We wont be giving too much away just yet but the fact you are reading this blog will give a good indicator of EcoForecourts feel and theme. Our thing is keeping it eco and keeping it green both visually and literally. To echo our eco status we are hosting EF on 100% carbon neutral servers, we are only a short time into establishing EF and already we are setting the foundations for a sustainable service through green technology.

If you have any recommendations for how we can be greener please let us know - we're all ears :)

Go well.

Our website development progress 1

Seeing as EcoForecourt is not actually live yet we thought it might be interesting to share with you what it has been like for us developing the site so far, what stage we are currently up to and the decisions and tasks we have had to tackle along the way.

One of the firs stages was to create wireframe layouts of how the site is going to be displayed, grey lines with no pictures look pretty boring we know, but we want to make EF as super user friendly as we can so this stage was very important from day one. The idea was the less cluttered the better. We opted for clean lines and no fuss so everyone knows just how to navigate the site and gets the most out of it. Here is one of our early wireframes for the Homepage:

News page wireframe:

Although these pages have evolved a little since their conception it has basically remained the same layout, pretty minimal and clutter free - we look forward to you trying it out!

Please feel free to give us your input on the designs - especially if you see a spelling mistake!

Go well.