Flashmech

As mentioned in my previous post, Diamondbrite is my first HTML website in 5 years.

The purpose of this post is to demystify the various technologies used in this website, so that even if you are a newbie trying to build a website for the first time, you can take this post as a point of reference to the various technologies already available to you.

It serves a secondary purpose to encourage you that even under a tight deadline, leveraging the right tools can also get you up to speed to building standards compliant websites that are both SEO friendly and accessible to a larger audience.

With the given ten days deadline, four days were used to read up on XHTML and CSS, and the next two days on jQuery. I emphasized on spending quality time to read up these as I believe a strong foundation will make haste in development later.

While developing the website, I leveraged on the existing jQuery engine with ThickBox, a jQuery plugin that supports iframed content. This eliminates the need for pop-ups which might be blocked by the end-user, not to mention that it’s aesthetically more attractive as well.

Other tools include the jQuery plugin Tooltip by bassistance.de, and the JavaScript Form Validator from JavaScript-Coder.com, which I found was both easy to understand and implement.

The final phase saw me removing Flash generated codes used to embed swf files into HTML, by using SWFObject, an easy-to-use and standards-friendly method to embed Flash content.

Looking back, the entire development cycle was a very fun and exciting journey while learning new things everyday, albeit intensive.

You can check the completed website over at www.diamondbrite.com.sg.

Gaia has always been a framework that I wanted to use to develop a website, and so when I got the chance to develop this project, Gaia immediately came to my mind.

The site itself was kept pretty simple in the effects departments, because it had to portray the heritage and premium quality of the product, so classic fade ins and outs were employed. Although my passion is to explore generative effects, it was good to keep it simple for this project as I can then focus my attention on how Gaia works.

Although I met up with a couple of difficulties during development (due to my inadequate knowledge of the framework, of course), I must still say it was a joy to develop. Transition changes between pages were easily fixed because of the Gaia flow, and adding pages to the site was a breeze with the scaffolding engine.

In addition, it also helped me to create the context menu, deep linking to various sections within the site, and gosh! I can even forget about loadMovie, because the loading of external assets are already taken care of by Gaia. It definitely made the development of this project so much more enjoyable!

The website is now live, and you can check it out here.

My first AS3 project is now live!

The site features a gallery where users can upload their montaged images to celebrate the maiden flight of the Singapore Airlines A380 to London.

Check it out here!

While you’re there, do give the sorting function a try! Switch between the Vote & Date options to see the effect that my colleague and I spent a couple of hours on!