Updates and Etc

OK a lot has changed. Well, a lot of the coding anyway. You may not see major differences in the overall look and feel, but I have changed how the site works substantially. There were a number of issues with how it was operating before, and I couldn't continue building the site knowing those problems were there. Now everything should be fixed, and I think it's on the way to becoming a nice little site. I have posted the link below.

Click here to see the site (make sure to read below first!)

Some things to keep in mind and watch out for:

- It's heavier than before, so wait a bit for everything to load. Building custom Flash Preloaders is a mystery to me and WAY more complicated than I thought. For now, you'll just have to wait.

- The "About", "Info", and "Support" areas are currently clickable pages. There is also some clickable content within these pages. You'll also notice that a large portion of the site is now Flash. It sort of evolved into this out of necessity and it's been a learning process to tweak it into this format.

- The menu is now up in the left corner. It's there for a few reasons, both aesthetic and functional. First of all, I think it looks better, but it also allows me more space to work with. It also fixes a terribly annoying Dreamweaver bug that was messing with alignment.

- The layout for the content is structured differently now because of the new menu position. I am using the floating boxes to house most of the content, with little extras (like the cloud-man and the swinging photo). I think this will be both interesting and more consistent with the feel of the page overall.

- You can click on both people (the guy in the plane and on the cloud). Each of them has something to say! The idea here was twofold: 1) Increase the "exciting" factor of the site, and 2) to provide me a vehicle for delivering Shakespeare-esque messages in a "voice" I thought appropriate for the feel of the site. It should feel silly, but also a bit theatrical. Later, they will look a bit more like Shakespearean characters.

- The clouds will follow your mouse slightly, so have fun with them. Also I fixed the man in the plane, he should move faster now.

- There is a lot still to be done. Obviously flushing out the rest of the content is the priority. Once this is done, and if I have time, I would like to play around with some other extra bits as well. Ideally, there will be curtain over the city that will "reveal" the scene and also set the stage as it were for the rest of the site. I am thinking about fixing the transitions between the pages so they flow into one another and don't just appear randomly. I know how to do this, but won't implement it unless I feel the rest of the site (content etc) is up to snuff.

- I am aware that the "pop" sound effects on the mouse overs are too loud. My export settings within Flash are being all screwy. Maybe it's time for CS4?

Site Progress

Phew! What a crazy week. Going from Illustrator to Dreamweaver/Flash is an unpredictable process! I have to say, the problems I was expecting were easily overcome, and the things I thought would be easy took forever. The Flash stuff was really fun and I plan to flush that out a lot more next week. Hopefully I'll have some city sounds going on, as well as a few Shakespeare inspired sound bytes when you click around. The HTML section has been simple to develop so I hope to have a few more pages done by next week. Something I am excited about doing is a Form. I have never done one before so I think that will be fun to try and incorporate. I've gotten through about 3 pages so far, and I am still finessing a lot of details here and there. I've put a link below so you can see where I am at currently.

Click here to view current Prototype (work in progress)
(the "About" and "Media" pages are working links. Also be sure to click on the images in the gallery to see the javascript work!)

There are a few lingering problems that I am aware of. The biggest one, something I should have realized before I started is the window size. Right now, the website is approx 1280 x 890 pixels. This is fine when you have the luxury to be on a 23inch monitor, but for laptops (that are mostly running at 1280 x 800) you cannot see the bottom of the page. For now, I've re-enabled the scroll bars, but I want to site to hide these so it really feels like a mini site. When I do this, and the monitor size is too small, you cannot view the rest of the page. Right now, the fix is just having the scroll bars back, but next week I am going to reformat the whole thing to fit in a smaller window so I can eliminate the scroll bar functionality and have it look really clean.

Image Loading Code Demo

I have also prepared a small demo of how the photos will load off of my media page. As you have seen, there are only thumbnails on the media page and no space for the full photos. The reason for this is because I plan to make each image clickable and enlarge into a small gallery that overlays the page. It's somewhat hard to explain, so please go here to see what I mean. The idea would be that each image in my media gallery will behave exactly like the one on my demo page. (The reason I couldn't incorporate this into the clickable version of the site is because the script won't run off of an image map)

Prototype ish

On my last post you were able to see each page individually that I designed for this week. I have also prepared a very basic clickable version that you can see here. You are able to click on the "info", "media", and "support" buttons. In each case, it's just loading a JPG of the page, but it will help give a sense of how you can move about and what you'll be confronted with. It's more natural than just looking at each one from a Blogger site. (apologies for resizing your browser window...I know this is a web no no, but I wanted to make sure the content filled the space effectively for the prototype.)

Page Redesign

New colors, a Golden Gate Bridge, some Presidio buildings, and a tagline! Woo! I think these new elements complete the look and feel I was going for. There are some details, like grass etc, that I will add later when I start working in Flash. I tried to design a wide range of content laden pages, with little overlap of layout. These four pages should give you and idea of how the various types of content would conform to the screen real estate I have to work with. I really like the playful/hand drawn look and I think the content "fits" better than it did last week. It no longer looks pasted on and should feel more a part of the overall page.