New and finally useful look of Porec.hr

Poreč is one of the top destinations in Croatia. It’s a little town on the west side of Istria, and is very popular in European population. After five years, it was time to do more with a website, and make it (more) useful.

Old website

I don’t know what statistics says, but I know that only few people knew that the Town has website with some news and information there, but also with some general problems like very low usability (navigation working only at IE is no-no, fixed fonts, news not-so-new etc). These are the things that we tried, and still trying to make better and more useful for the citizens and people who is navigating throw the site.

New look

As the most portals and big sites, we went for bigger resolution. 1024px wide was perfect for that size of content. Home page has lots of data, but still growing.

Main menu and content

Is huge, so we decided to go with four column menu, but with one fancy detail, you can’t see all categories before you put your mouse over, in that way, we are not destroying the content at the bottom, and they are flexible to add more categories they want (example of doing the opposite).

Bottom content is divided also in four columns, with the accent on the last news. There is photo album, some hot news, live webcam, and some "web 2.0" gadget like video gallery, powered by Youtube. When you open some news or category item, you can see that the main menu is different; it's a standard dropdown menu. Why? The first and only reason is to put the main content up, and avoid scrolling to it.

Some cool details

I used jQuery for adding final touch and try making some parts of site more useful. Some of them are: Sending a link to friend, main menu opening, comments toggle (show/hide), head slideshow (at this moment still inactive) etc.

jQuery is very powerful cross browser javascript library, and with some knowledge you can make very interesting things. Few links that can help you:

• jQuery
• Learning jQuery
• jQuery for Designers

Site tools

I made some detail, which will help some users that are not so close with Internet navigation. With this tools you can enlarge main content font, add feed to your feed software, or send the page link (that you are looking) to a friend and print the page. Almost all this function you already have and you can use it very easy (to enlarge site font: mac users command +/-, win users ctrl +/-), awesome tip right?.

Site is still growing, and lots of data is still not public, like languages, site will be on Croatian, as default, and will have choice for Italian, English and Deutsch. And is powered by great CMSinfosit.

Check the site