Work and Stuff

Well, I just got a non-spam comment to this blog (thank K) which sort of reminded me that this blog-o-thing exists and people occasionally stumble in here. I've been meaning to post something new and interesting for a while, so without further ado...

I've been getting quite absorbed in my work lately. The latest project I am working on (err, slaving away at) is Amy's fabulous web site: KnittingHelp.com. The site continues to grow in popularity and with each newbie knitter visitor I cringe. You see, the existing web site design was knocked out in a weekend in 2004. At the time it was just a pet project for Amy so I put very little forethought into the design and just created a unreasonably clean and simple design. It's a horrible design in my opinion, in both aesthetics and coding, with all sort of nasty nested tables and an atrocious image based navigation. Yuck! It such a shame to my design ideals!

Earlier in the year I set forth to create a new design, but the pressures of my day job quickly overtook that. But here we are at the cusp of a new knitting season and I decided a couple weeks ago to delve back into the new KH design as a last ditch effort to restore my dignity.



This is just a corner screen shot. I don't want to revel too much just yet. But here's some technical highlights of the new design:

• Pure CSS and XHTML design coded to web standards and fully validating. Heck Yes!


• CSS based two-tier navigation. You wouldn't believe how much work went into this part! I think I invented a new way of doing this, so I may release a tutorial when I have it cleaned up.


• Ajax enabled goodness!


• Takes advantage of some nice javascript libraries such as
  Prototype , Scriptaculous and Mootools


• Videos are (slowly) being refilmed and converted to Flash and played through a psuedo-streaming Flash player. The new videos are much larger (480 x 320) and have better quality and sound with little increase in bandwidth overhead.


• Videos are no longer displayed in a pop-up window but rather get displayed via an Ajax call through
  HighSlide JS. Very slick!


• CSS themes! Boy knitters can choose blue themes and girl knitters can choose pink :) We'll probably have 4 to 5 separate color themes.


• The new site is being build with Modx, a CMS and PHP application framework. This will make for nice an easy development and future management of the site, as well as the possibility of having other editors and contributors add content to the web site.

Well, that's it in a nutshell. As you can see the new KH is very technologically enabled and full of web 2.0 bling. At the same time, I am building the site to degrade elegantly in older browsers which might not support some of the advanced features. The goal is to make a elegant site that is accessible to everyone. The work to date has involved a lot of freshing and expanding of my skill-set as well as many nights working past 1:AM. I am thoroughly enjoying every challenge the re-design as presented and hopefully we'll be ready for phase one of the launch in a couple weeks.
•

[1] comments (1308 views) |  [0] Trackbacks   [0] Pingbacks