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Rembrandt 400 Leiden

Rembrandt 400 Leiden

July, 2005 Client: City of Leiden*

The year 2006 is marked by the 400th birthday of Rembrandt van Rijn, the Dutch painter who was born in Leiden, The Netherlands. I've had the honor and the privilege of working on the official website while at Media Design, an opportunity that allowed me to use web standards on a large, multi-lingual website.

With the celebrations running throughoug the entire year of 2006, the Rembrandt 400 festival is certain to draw many an international tourist into the city of Leiden. To cater to such a diverse crowd, the website was to be available in five languages: Dutch, English, French, German and Japanese; not the simplest of challenges. Moreover, all five languages had to be easily manageable in the Content Management System and it was, of course, of the utmost importance that Internationalization was handled properly.

Thankfully, the CMS that I worked on at Media Design, Snelsite, was already capable of handling different languages without a problem. With the entire system operating on Unicode, it ended up being a simple matter of copy-pasting the translated content into the site. Language checks were used in the templates to ensure that the proper attributes were being set in each area of the site, and before we even knew it, we were done.

Of course, on the technical side we still ran into a few problems, largely thanks to the print-like design of the site made by Hart voor de Zaak. The front page's menu items, positioned in a half-circle around the Rembrandt 400 logo, were of varying sizes across the languages. Some languages would have one word for certain menu items, while others used multiple words for them. To accomodate for this issue, I used absolute positioning to keep the menu items fixed precisely in place, regardless of language. This worked very well, even when scaling the text.

As a developer and fierce advocate of Web Kaizen, the clean and accessible markup used for the site was a great personal success, paired with the use of CSS for presentation. With the separation of content and presentation, it was a much easier process to give the front page of the site a unique look compared to the other pages, as well as including 9 colored themes across the entire site.

Visit the Rembrandt 400 Leiden website.

* Client was a customer of the company I was working for at the time: Media Design.