25 October 2007

Minisite 3 Review



As I already said, minisite 3 was up. There are a couple of updates compared to minisite 2.

Navigation
Now users who browse minisite 3 will enjoy skimming through the interactive pop up boxes. When an user browses through the different categories, they will be given the option to quickly browse through all thumbnail images. Then if the user wants to view a particular image, then can click on the image to enlarge the image, then they will have to click either on the image or outside to close the large image to see all the smaller thumbnail images. This mutli-image gallery is all done in CSS.

In addition, more images have been uploaded now. This includes model photos, construction photos more concept sketches.

Site Design
The website now has a more clearer focus on the robotic theme. There are random micro text, some random abstract art to give the website a very futuristic, digital feel. An image of cylons from the popular tv show Battlestar galactica is also shown.
However I wanted white lines to boarder around the lower image, so I used tables in the html code such that the long cylon image doesn't look like it's just plonked there. The table also gives website some structure.

Opacity
When the user browses through the links, there will be transparencies. This gives the website a more sophisticaded depth. However there is a problem with this. It works fine in Mozilla Firefox, However there are some compatibility problems with internet explorer. For some reason, when you click to enlargen an image, the small thumbnails appear over on top of it as well. Strange...I had spent hours trying to fix it and I can't solve the problem. I may have to start from scratch to find out the problem.

Final Product Photos
The final product is finally documented in the form of photos. Some photos have different resolutions and this had created problems. Some photos are landscape and some photos are in portrait form. Since the thumbnail preview boxes are in landscape form, I also chose to display all the images in a landscape format. This required me to do some photo editing in photoshop so that the portrait photos' resolutions aren't warped.

Of course I could of portrait form sized versions of those thumbnail preview boxes, but I wanted all the thumbnail images to be of the same image format to keep the same consistency.

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