Thinking that constantly changing static HTML websites is an awfully boring job Mathias Wollin and Martin Schuster came up with the idea of building websites dynamically from a database and an application server early in 1999. Not a very unique idea, as one knows now, as hundreds and thousands of content management systems came out not much later, and nowadays nearly every website is based on such a system. At that time nearly all (and still today some) systems suffer from an ugly and not so userfriendly interface design. Thought from the users perspective right from the start, aspekt:ratio was designed and constructed with the unexperienced website author in mind. The result is a clean, readable and user expectation conforming interface that enables people to do complicated tasks easily, even if it’s only once a year.
aspekt:ratio was built on LAMP-basis using Linux operating system, Apache webserver, MySQL Database and PHP as the application server.
Our project partner DG Medien is using aspekt:ratio with an attached PDF generation to output printable PDF-files directly from aspekt:ratio. This makes it possible to pass the content directly on to a print shop without any further conversion. The advantages of this workflow compared with static templates e.g. in MS Word are obvious. The results are of constant aesthetic quality and visual precision. The users can easily make sure they provided all necessary information without having to write numerous emails and the costs per print product edition reduce dramatically.