Design and Practicality

12:11pm Saturday 10th of October, 2009

In July this year I began working on my next site, hoping to have it ready by November - in time for my summer Uni holidays. I set out to showcase some newfound skills both with JavaScript (or more specifically AJAX) and Flash's ActionScript 3.0, both of which I wrote entirely in object-oriented code.

Sadly, however, the closer I came to finishing the site, the more it dawned on me that it wasn't going to work.

I wanted to showcase my skills as an interactive developer, and began with making a JavaScript-rich HTML site which consisted of only a single page for each section. The blog posts would load using AJAX, and they 'animated' onto the screen as they loaded.

Unsatisfied with the quality of animation (not to mention the relatively huge task of building animation classes from scratch), I moved the production on to Flash exclusively however I still found the same fundamental problem: there was still only one page for the blog.

My keenest interest is in interactive design and development and therefore SEO - for the most part is something I don't really have to delve into, but should remain conscious of. So I've ditched it all In the name of SEO; not simply because I didn't possess the skills to SEO it, but because I knew it would be ultimately impossible to optimize because of the very way in which it worked.

So I've started from scratch with my new website and am halfway through developing the blog (as I don't use any existing frameworks such as Wordpress or Joomla, the blog itself is the site's largest component).

Thanks to a few nights where my left brain was afforded some much- needed downtime I've bolstered the site with some Photoshop-infused graphics and illustrations so that it won't look quite as mechanical as my 2008 site. (Check out www.flickr.com/kashmaniac to see what I'm talking about.)

The new site will still be JavaScript and AJAX-rich however it is designed to degrade gracefully and won't hinder SEO practices by means of content omission or delayed-loading like with the previous attempt.

I will continue through October (which I expect will be laden with a myriad of assessments for uni that will require my attention) and hopefully have it completed by January next year.

In the meantime, check out the relic at http://www.kashmaniac.com.au/website2009.