Challenge: I wanted to create a simple and attractive site that gave users information about my wedding. Further, I wanted the bride to be involved in the content, that way we could have both the bride and groom's perspective, to make for a really interesting site.
Solution: I've been wanting to get experience with Content Managment Systems (CMS) for awhile, and this project offered a perfect chance. I wanted Shannon to easily add a lot of information to the site, and since our wedding planning stage is constantly evolving I thought that our friends and family would be interested in a blog. For someone who isn't tech savvy, but who is a great writer, adding Shannon to the project through CMS worked great. I chose Wordpress for CMS, since it is widely regarded as the best system for blogging. For the theme I chose the brilliantly designed Atahualpa. To make it unique, I created the logo and banner in Adobe Illustrator based on two wedding rings. I also found the Common License photograph of the champagne glasses, the photo matched our wedding colors, and the soft focus really added texture to the site.
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Challenge: My earlier website has some issues with older browsers, the .png transparency did not work on older versions of IE. Further, I wanted to tryout some new layout techniques using Fireworks and work a Flash movie into the homepage.
Solution: I kept much of the same design themes and color patterns from my version 2 site, and I even decided to keep the JavaScript gallery as it still felt seamless with the new site. Instead of a more floral swirly design, I used simpler circles and swirlies that would be easier to work with in Flash. For the layout I used Fireworks to cut up an image into sections and then utilized CSS to put everything into place . The result is a much lighter and professional layout. For the Home page I created a Flash movie with animated circles to pull the viewers eye in immediately and reinforce the thematic design.
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Challenge: For my personal website I wanted to experiment with new design techniques to express myself on the web and make a showcase of my web design skills. In doing so I wanted to make design the main goal while still keeping the site user friendly and efficient.
Solution: I employed some new techniques in layering and transparency with .png files to give the site a free floating look. I also used some interesting Photoshop brushes to create the "swirly" background. The "swirly" design is very popular right now and also gives the foreground a nice contrast in both form and style. The only JavaScript I used on the mainpage was for the navigation bar buttons which create an interesting effect and also help user accessiblity. I also used CSS to separate form and style to keep the weight down and make a W3C compliant page. I created a separate, but similiar design for the gallery, so that I could fit as much of the images in the screen as possible. I also used significantly more JavaScripting than I did on the homepage so that the user can look through the images without having to load up different pages.
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Challenge: My main goal for this site was to show off Jon's work as much as possible without having it compete with the site design. This would be difficult because I still wanted to stay true to a certain aesthetic quality of the artist. My secondary goal was to keep the page loading times down, as an art portfolio site there would have to be a lot of high quality images that would drag down the speed.
Solution: I decided to go with a minimalistic look which is very attractive but also contrasts Jon's organic work with very hard angles. While looking at other woodworking sites I saw a lot of tacky images and backgrounds of wood; I decided to use different shades of gray to not only reflect on Jon's modern perspective, but to also let the colors in his work pop out. The minimalist design also worked well with my goal of keeping load times down; for example, on the navigation buttons I used text CSS rollovers instead of JavaScript image rollovers. I thought they looked appealing and took up a fraction of the load time JavaScript would have. The Flash Movie on the homepage did add to the weight, but made up for it's extra load-time by creating a eye-catching, yet tasteful draw for the users when they first enter the page.
