Behind the scenes Part 1

The designer side of me is always questioning the developer side of me.

As you may or may not know, I have a website that features some projects that I have done for various clients spanning various industries. While I like the one page portfolio look of it, I think that its a bit too straightforward. Yes, I use a decent font or two and the color scheme is muted to an extent to allow the work to pop off the page but besides the Mootools sliding info panel that I have used, the rest is plainly there for you to see.

In fact, the next time that you will interact with the site would be to click through to view the actual site and hopefully to contact me for further information.

Someone looking for the whiz-bang factor will not be so impressed initially by the overwhelmingly static nature of the site. I have seen some folks utilize one or more variants of a scrolling page functionality in their one page portfolio. This makes some sense, as I suppose some people would be impressed that the page can be scrolled smoothly to a certain position just by clicking a link or button. The two prevalent forms that this is employed is with a static navigational section on either side or at the top of the page with a z-index higher than the rest of the document so its on a higher layer OR a simple "Back to top" link that scrolls back to the top of the document sprinkled wherever the the developer thought it should go.

My next iteration of my website is keeping with my one page folio theme but improving on it with the use of the Scriptaculous/Prototype Framework. This framework allows you to script the above described effects and a whole lot more with the use of Javascript (obviously) and CSS. Mix in a bit of server side processing and you are really on the cutting edge of web development.

This methodology for creating web pages is now commonly referred to in the industry as Front End programming. Which I'm no expert but it seems to be a title thats not thought out properly because usually this entails also programming tasks that communicate through AJAX (XML and/or your fav server side programming language) with the back end (server) of a web application or site. Meh, apples and oranges right?

Stay tuned for Part 2.