The design of your hosted site is specific to your requirements; we will either provide a design in the required look and feel, or build a design from existing design elements in artwork or sites provided by you.

There are several ways in which we try to accomplish the goal of unifying the design elements in your hosted solution with your platform. These include the following:

Remote Content Inclusion

WhatsOnWhen has developed a sophisticated system for pulling in, caching, and inserting remote third-party elements into a page. Whenever possible, WhatsOnWhen will ask you to provide the elements of the page which provide your look and feel - headers, footers, menus, common site navigation, and other important blocks of content which will be managed by you as a part of your overall site on your own website.

You will then provide URLs to that content - one for each of the elements - to WhatsOnWhen, and that content will be used during the site build and live deployment. When you wish to change your navigation for our site specifically, or across all of your sites, you can simply change the content on your own servers; changes to cached content will take anywhere from 1 to 24 hours to propagate (configured as per your requirements, or set to 24 hours by default).

In many ways, this is similar to an iframe - however, an iframe is different in three important ways: First and foremost, content in iframes is handled by the client browser, and not within the server; as such, there are several unusual limitations and strange behavior in client systems. (IFrames are never a recommended solution by us; we will do everything in our power to not only avoid using them on our side, but convince you of the many, better ways of doing so on your site to integrate our content.) Second, iframes are complete pages; they include HTML head, body, meta-tags, and other content which should not exist in the content snippet you provide us for remote content inclusion. Third, iframes do not share the style of the main content; content included via our mechanisms act as a server-side-include would on a webserver - the content becomes a transparent part of our page, and is affected by any and all CSS which applies to that page.

For more information, have a look at our documentation on how we can proxy remote content on our hosting platform.

Remote CSS

Whenever possible, we will request that you provide us with CSS that you wish us to load into the system from your own; these allow you to provide style overrides and force style onto our content matching your required look and feel. When remote navigation elements are used, this is vital to ensure that the elements we pull from your site remotely are styled appropriately.

When remote navigation elements are in use, consider providing us your core CSS elements in use within your existing site.

Hosted Static Content

WhatsOnWhen has developed a sophisticated system which allows customers to directly upload and manage static content held on our servers - CSS, images, and other content - through DAV services. This is linked into the WhatsOnWhen user management database, stores its contents in a common database used across all live servers, supports DAV authoring and versioning clients, is compatible with Dreamweaver, Web Folders on Windows XP, MacOS X WebDAV mounting from the desktop, and clients from a variety of other manufacturers.

If you do not wish to host the content on your own servers, access to our content management system via DAV can be purchased by customers to manage their own static content; otherwise, WhatsOnWhen can perform changes to static content held in the system at an hourly rate.

Various elements of static HTML that we create as a part of your website by us will be loaded into the DAV system by us; we use that system during site construction to build your site, in order to make the site build as straightforward as possible and to simplify change management during verification.