How do you want your Blues? Let us count the CSS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) August 12, 2005 -- Build Your Own Blues Festival is a unique, two-day music festival featuring many bands in many locations all over Madison, Wisconsin. Unlike typical music festivals with a centralized location, BYOB is city wide, featuring headliner acts in concert hall settings, backed by regional and local musicians, from full band to solo artist performing on outdoor stages, street corners, and "club blues" in local restaurants and bars all over town.

A festival where music fans create their own concert plans... this band, this stage, this club, this time... a mix and match schedule, demanded a website of the same caliber. This theme was all Identity Developments needed to jump on the bandwagon. "When I heard the announcement for the event on 105.5 Triple M, I knew that, no matter what else happened that day, Identity Developments was going to be involved," says Brian Brown.

Web design firms always look for inspirations from their clients, whether it be colors, look, feel, philosophy, shapes, anything. That's part of what separates a typical template design from a truly custom product. In this case, it was the underlying theme that made the difference. The whole concept of building your own blues experience was paramount. "Even before meeting with Triple M, I knew that style sheet switching was the foundation for the whole project," says Brian.

Cascading style sheets, CSS, are critical elements in proper web design in separating the content from the layout. Used properly, the basic web page today is almost entirely focused on raw content or information. CSS is used to tell the browser how the page should look� fonts, colors, graphics, even where different elements should appear.

The BYOB site actually utilizes a number of alternate style sheets to deliver not just one layout or design, but several. This allowed for a number of different color combinations and entire themes to be developed for visitors to the site to choose from. "This is actually a very simple example, mainly changing colors, graphics, and very minor positioning. Proper coding and CSS gives us the ability to change nearly anything, " states Brian. "Given the short timeline for development to launch to event, it was best to keep things simple. Besides, the BYOB site had to appeal to a very wide audience. Many web users aren't used to seeing drastic changes to the page they are viewing. The end goal was to add interactivity and to play into the theme of the event, but still keep things simple and usable for the audience."

So if you are looking to express your own musical or website needs, be sure to check out Build Your Own Blues at www.buildyourownblues.com, where you can get your blues served up in many ways, and colors.

Identity Developments, a full service web presence design & development firm based in Madison, Wisconsin, focuses on XHTML, CSS, table-less-layout, web standards compliant, and accessible website design. At Identity Developments, it's not about websites, it's about your identity.