OMG! Look at our new website!
Published by Christopher Betlejemski on 23 July 2008.We just released our newest creature into the wild: the redesigned & reengineered Hall Associates website. Sure, it's shiny and smells of leather, but what's under the hood? Let's see:
standards
Yeah, we like our web standards. This beast validates as XHTML 1.1 strict! No silly table layouts here... just nice, semantic markup, precision placed with lean, clean CSS.
ajax
I'm not a wagon-jumper, but I think it's a safe bet now. AJAX has been around for a while, and a few nice javascript libraries have come to light. Some are big and feature rich, while some are tight and lean. I'm a minimalist, so I opted for jQuery. Easy to work with, tiny footprint, and a syntax that makes me swoon. We used it mainly for effects, so (technically) we should be calling it DHTML... but, we are using jQuery's AJAX features in our updated CMS!
cms
I'm quite proud of our evolving CMS product. The latest iteration has a real framework which makes developing new modules - and extending existing ones - a snap! Much like Mac OSX has it's "Core" architecture, our CMS has it's own "cores", which allow us to delegate tasks which will automatically be handled by the system. Programmers are supposed to be lazy.
As noted above, we integrated some AJAXy features into our CMS. It is mainly used for real-time asset management (eg. re-ordering, deleting photos & files within a document). Not only does it work beautifully, it also looks neat... fancy fade-in/fade-outs. Cool.
transparencies
Design-wise, Brendan liked the "layered" look... multiple layers with different opacities, all overlapping each other. In the past, I would have shouted "no!" and swatted him on the forehead... but it was his birthday (or so he claimed). So, I build the site with all the 8-bit, alpha channel PNG goodness I could muster. It looked pretty awesome. Then we looked at it in Internet Explorer 6. Damn!
I briefly considered hacking the crap out of IE6 via javascript, but that's a sloppy (and crashy) fix that would make me feel like a crummy human being. So, my final solution was simple: serve up an additional stylesheet for IE6 (and older). The additional stylesheet simply overwrites a few rules, and just draws in plain-jane JPG images.
Genius? Absolutely.
end of blog summary
Enjoy the new site. It's good.