Opps... I forgot to update last week. Last week I did a lot of work on all the sites that I've been working on. I finished up my portfolio site and got a few versions of the Little Giant site up. I also got a lot of work done on the Tabe Tai site, which you can access by clicking on the respective links in my portfolio site.



Click Here to View Portfolio Site


Click Here to View Tabe Tai Site


Click Here to View Little Giant Site

This week I spent a lot of my time getting most of the buttons up on my portfolio site. I also worked on the advertising page of that site quite a bit trying to see how I wanted to present the larger images of the thumbs present on that page. I went through several ideas and some trial and error but I finally got something functional that I'm pretty happy with. When you hover over the images and link buttons on the advertising page an a larger image or file will present itself until you hover off the thumb/link button. I'm working on doing that to the rest of the pages and will then continue work on the other sites that I'm working on like the Little Giant and Tabe Tai sites. I also want to get a css version up of my portfolio site with the flash intro and I think I should be able to get that done as well.


Click Here to View Portfolio Site

I thought I'd get this up tonight while I was thinking about it in case I forget tomorrow. I did more more on my portfolio this week. I decided to do the paper transitions on the timeline instead of calling them as external swf files since that part has been giving me so much trouble and I'm not exactly sure why. However, the pages are working as they should be now. I'm still going to use the card game idea which was meant to replace this if I never got it to work. Instead, I'm probably going to go with the idea in going all out with the animations and have a card peeking through somewhere and either have it moving a little or have it move the mouse hovers over it. The cards will then just act as splash to the html/css version of the site and so that way there will be several different ways to get to the same content and in a sense showcase what I can do in flash and in html and css.


Click Here to View Index Page

Apart from breaking apart the work I had done on the portfolio site and reconstructing it, I also continued work on the layouts for the other portfolio pages. The layouts for these pages aren't set in stone as of yet but I'm pretty happy with them.




I should note that I don't have these pages placed up on the portfolio site yet. The only page images right now is the advertising page. I did also make the buttons on the advertising page though they don't currently go anywhere since I'm still playing around with how I want the thumbnail images to link to larger preview images of the same files shown.

I'm sorry I'm a little late. My eldest sister drove down on Thursday from Tennessee and I've been losing track of time ever since she's been here. I finally found the time to just sit down and post what I've been up to. This past week I came up with a new idea for my portfolio. If all else fails since I still haven't been able to find out what is wrong with the preview portfolio page I was working on, I hope that this piece will be able to stand on its own. If I do get my other idea to work out, I hope that I'll be able to implement this idea into it. The general idea is a game of "pick the card." A hand shuffles the cards around and when it's done, you have the option of picking a card. The card is then taken off the screen, flipped, and then slid back into place with a menu card. This menu card tells you what the card will take you to if you click it again. When you click it again (though I don't have the pages coded yet) it should take you to an image gallery of sorts that you can click to view the pieces on that particular page. These pages will probably be coded in css and possibly javascript rather than flash.

Click Here to Preview

I should note that since I uploaded this version of the file, I found out how make a transparent background on flash and I will be using that instead of the pale yellow I threw on there to make the stage easier to see while I was working on it.

This week I messed around a little more with the email form that I made earlier. I wanted to keep things simple but still have elements from the rest of the site that I wasn't sure was quite there with the earlier version of the email form. I played with drawings for the side and decided to the cactus since it is prevalent in most of the pages. I also played around with the idea of adding a custom scrollbar since I wasn't too fond of the default one that comes in flash since it kind of stands out like a sore thumb with the rest of the graphics which lend themselves to be warm and just a little grungy. First I tried messing with the components of the default scrollbar but all that gave me was errors so I searched around for a tutorial online and tried a few of them until I found one that actually worked. I'm pretty happy with it right now since it's shiny and new and working but who knows, I may still end up playing around with it. I should add that I had a few friends test the form out using the print and send options on their computers and it works.


Click Here to View Email Form

I recently purchased the ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional book and while I'm sure I won't use most of what is in the book I did come across something that I thought would help me in my website projects. There is a chapter in the book on Printing and sending email with actionscript. I decided to try this tutorial for my Little Giant site and came up with the following:


Click Here to View Email Form

I'm not sure if that will be the final layout for the page but I'm pretty pleased with the results. I don't seem to be coming up with any error messages so everything should be in working order but I've yet to fully test it out.

I tried working a little more on my portfolio site but I can't do much until I can get the problem fixed with the navigation. I still haven't figured out why that last frame on the page animation doesn't want to work. So I put that aside for a while and worked more on one of the fictitious restaurant sites I'm working on. At first I thought I wanted to do a sliced background in css for it but after fiddling with the code and images for several hours so I could get the sizes right and the tiling to be seamless I decided I didn't like how it looked with the background of my SWF file so I scraped it and went for a solid background until I can make something I like that doesn't seem too busy with the rest of the site. As far as working in Flash, I reconstructed pages, opting for several small image files versus one large image file. I've added the Career pages and you can now go back and forth between the page sections whereas before you had to hit the main button to go back to the main page to navigate to the desired page in Careers for instance.

On a side note, I will probably have to make a preloader for the site since the file is getting pretty large but I haven't started on it yet. So if it takes a while to load it's not because the page is empty, it's just taking a while to load.


Click to view site

I'm still working on the other site but I haven't nailed down a layout I want to use for the rest of the site. I want it to resemble a scroll, much like the print menu I made that is the inspiration for the site but I haven't decided how I want to go about doing that yet.