The Emmanuelle Beart Site

This is the fifth version of the Emmanuelle Beart site, the first was done in 1995 and was hosted in my University (UCL) user area. More recently the site has been hosted at www.emmanuellebeart.co.uk and www.emmanuellebeart.ndirect.co.uk

This version has a database backend, and a brand new interface design. Both these changes took a lot of research and time (several years of elapsed time since version 4.5), I hope you enjoy it. Things should now be much easier to maintain, so expect more frequent updates.

Choice of topic

Topics

The very first web site I ever designed (1995, when the web was brand new) was about me, I realised within a few days that no one was particularly interested in what I had to say about myself.  

I had become curious about French films after seeing Un Coeur en Hiver on TV - a film I chanced across and thought was brilliant.  Exploring the web at the time did not take very long.  There were a total of 3 (lousy) web sites about Emmanuelle BÉart the star of the film and not much else.  So I took the information from these sites and represented it in one site.

It seemed like a good topic to try out this new HTML stuff, text, pictures and so forth.  It was also interesting to other people, so there were people visiting my site and making comments, which led me to redesign the web site many times and add more information.  

My choice of a somewhat obscure actress in English speaking countries meant I was able to maintain my lead as the best provider of information on her.  Had I chosen a more well known Hollywood actress  it would have been very difficult and cost a fortune to stay current with new pictures and other media, due to the sheer quantity produced every week.

To sum up, a web site about Emmanuelle Beart was a good choice then as it is now:

• There is a wide range of readily available media such as pictures, movie clips and sound.
• A media rich web site, gives plenty to work with when designing it. 
• It is interesting to other people.  So I will receive feedback enabling me to improve (and debug) the site.
• The amount of data available is manageable (just about).
• My experiences with the original web site (not significantly changed in three years) enable me to design a better modern site using modern technologies like DHTML.
• Having content already, enabled me to concentrate on design.