Mondrian 2010 Relaunch
By Dave Redfern (Writer)
Published: 11 Aug 01:06 in News
Way back in 2002, Mondrian: A Study was created as a reference site about Piet Mondrian. It was inspired after one of his paintings was adopted as a sort of template for an earlier iteration of Madagasgar.com. The design has since been dropped, but the micro-site remained.
Over the years it was moved and tweaked a little here and there, some features removed and then recently it was being reviewed and it suddenly dawned that it some of it was very out of date - worse some of it was no longer functioning (the Flash applets that were on the site).
So over the course of a weekend, the site was redesigned using a derivative of the Scorpio theme and the content pulled into a database instead of being held in a set of HTML files. These changes allowed the content to be refreshed, corrected and better organised. The database was designed with that site in mind and is powered by the Scorpio Framework for PHP.
To keep the existing design, a "plate" system was devised where each page of content is represented as a link to a content item. This can be a page of text, painting or something else. Each plate then has an order so that they can be navigated. The whole system works very well for the site and the changes will allow the content to be much more easily moved around in future. As an added bonus, the back-end could be re-used in other similar sites.
Most of the writing is the same and all the images have been preserved, but are now indexed and available with thumbnails. A couple of features have been dropped - the Flash files and the time-lines and instead additional links have been added.
As the site was a re-build the existing links were not preserved, however the error pages do include links back into the site.
It was fun revisiting and updating the site and hopefully in this form it will be much more useful.
Be sure to have a look at Mondrian: A Study and find out more about this great artist who helped pioneer modern art.