EvoBloggito

Website Launch: FBT Architects in Albuquerque

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Oct 22, 2010; Category: Content Management System, Design/Development; Tags: CMS, Design/Development, jQuery; No Comments

We launched FBT Architects’ website this week. It marks an increasingly rare (for Evo) instance of building websites with a custom-developed Content Management System, as we’ve moved primarily to WordPress as a CMS platform.

In this case, however, a custom CMS was necessary to allow FBT the ability to manage the portfolio thumbnail grid images the way they wanted to, arranging them easily and intuitively in the CMS admin area. Adding complexity to the arrangement is the website’s need to highlight thumbnails in the grid when a category of projects is selected, while also changing the list of projects below the thumbnail grid. Further complexity was added by the need to list projects for which there is no thumbnail or project description. A modified jQuery Slideviewer was used to animate the images on the individual project pages.

This is another website designed by Kilmer & Kilmer, Brand Builders, for which Evo provides development and programming services in what has become an ongoing relationship. Though I sometimes give them a slight ribbing for being print designers, they’re actually great to work with because they listen and adjust when I identify an accessibility or other web-related issue. Not all print designers will do that, and their clients suffer as a result. It’s a credit to Kilmer that they put client needs high on the priority list when designing a website, and it’s one of the reasons I like working with them.

10 jQuery Plugins We Really, Really Like

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Dec 15, 2008; Category: Accessibility, CSS, Design/Development, jQuery; Tags: Accessibility, CSS, Design/Development, jQuery; No Comments

It wasn’t that long ago that javascript was considered a "kiddie" programming language, used mostly to inflict annoying browser behavior on website visitors. Then, AJAX came along, using javascript to process client-side requests. Suddenly, javascript was useful. jQuery has been described as "javascript that has grown up." Following are our current favorite plugins.

Thickbox – accommodates images (singly or in galleries), Flash, text, iframes, and AJAX, making it perhaps the most versatile of existing modal window scripts. Recently, there’s a Dreamweaver extension to further simplify implementation.

PrettyPhoto – another modal window that’s almost as versatile as Thickbox; we also like it because it’s so… pretty!

Watermark Input – unobtrusively allows hints in form fields that disappear when the user puts his cursor into the field.

jTabber – tabbed boxes that allow you to display hidden content on request, without reloading the page.

Superfish Menu – based on the suckerfish menu, this is a highly configurable menu system that supports IE6 and is accessible.

Scrollable HTML Table – like good little developers, we only use tables for displaying tabular data these days: this plugin allows you to fit a very long table into a short depth, scrolling it from top to bottom.

Colorize – another table plugin, this one for alternate coloring of rows and changing the color as you hover over each row.

jCarousel Lite – scrolls through images, highly configurable; we used this plugin for our portfolio presentation.

jqZoom – we haven’t had an opportunity to use this one yet, but it’s very cool; lets you "magnify" areas of an image.

s3Slider – another plugin we’re dying to use; maybe the coolest slide show effect ever.