April 15th
Last Friday Will put together a new design for the Thriftway Travel Categories and Individual Posts sections of the site. Today I set about converting what he had created in Photoshop into a working version in HTML, PHP and Javascript (wrapped up in my favourite Library, jQuery). It took a while to work some bits of it out, but I now have a wokring test version on my local server, and hope to have it integrated into the Thriftway Site by the end of the week.
The current Design can be viewed here and the mockup of the new design can be viewed here. I'm really liking this new design and can't wait to see it rolled out on the live site.
Posted by Wulf on April 15, 2009, 5:27 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
April so far...
April has proven to be a somewhat hectic month for me. Been working on a myriad of little projects and have a few bigger ones in the very immediate future. Juggling a million little tasks can prove to be quite problematic.
I helped finish off some of the details for Thriftway's April Fools emails, adding information to a design that Will produced, and later modifying it to ensure everyone knew it was an April Fools. I also had to look into some bugs in the Thriftway site caused by the front page advert rotator that is handled by jQuery. When I attached an extra style to the containing it caused things to break in IE6, for reasons unknown. This resulted in me adding an additional wrapping which holds the background for the panel. It irks me that such moves are necessary to make a browser happy, but I didn't code the software, just the site.
I also got to work on an e-flyer advertising flights with Continental Airlines, that went out to all of Thriftway's business partners, as well as one informing them of Thriftway's Easter opening hours, which I am rather proud of. Printed media isn't my forté so it's nice to have produced something along those lines that I like. It's also the reason that I asked Will to take one of the other projects I was asked to design, window flyers for the Thriftway office windows. Whilst it would be nice for me to have produced something so noticable to the public, I know my own strengths and limits. I'm more of a coder than a designer, especially when it comes to print. Will, by contrast, is very good with his printed media, even if he never likes anything he produces. So it'll be an opportunity for me to see how he approaches the task and hopefully to learn a thing or two from it.
I have also further refined the Thriftway flight search engine to now be much more predictive of people's input. Originally it would filter what was being typed from the start of each possible result. This would be fine if you only know the airport, but not if you were to put in the airport code, as it would result in no results being displayed at all. This has now been resolved using a jQuery plugin that searches using regular expressions, matching what is types to any part of the available results.
Finally I have been doing some work on the way that the flight search functions upon a user hitting the Search button. Now, in addition to displaying the results on the screen, the search box is pre-populated with the visitor's search criteria, making it easier for them to change their search criteria, should they need to.
In the future it looks like I will be helping to design a Wordpress based Artsekta website, as well as helping with the design of the Thriftway Consol website. Plenty to be keeping me busy.
Posted by Wulf on April 10, 2009, 9:13 am with 0 comments - Permalink
Tuesday 31st
I spent most of yesterday working on making some changes to the Thriftway Travel site. In particular I was implementing the new, jQuery based, flight search. I ran into a few problems along the way. The first noticeable one was that whenever I implemented the jQuery search (after updating the jQuery library and adding jQueryUI) was that the central block of the site no longer worked properly. Originally it was a section with three tabs, each set up to pull content from a specific category. It is currently a placeholder whilst we work on other details of the site, but it still needed fixed.
The original tabs were created/managed using an archaic version of the jQuery UI tabs, which had caused the problem as I implemented a new version, which messed up what had already been in place. Attempts to switch the old tabs over to the new version didn't work well at all. This gave me a chance to rework how things were working for that section. The end result is a carosel that rotates between as many deals as we want. It matches the look and feel of the site, and provides a much more flexible method of presenting deals on the front page.
Posted by Wulf on April 1, 2009, 10:37 am with 0 comments - Permalink
Monday 30th
Ysterday I spent the day working on more of the finer details of the Thriftway Site. I've finalised the Flight Search, and will be implementing it today into a local server version before making the big switch to the Live site.
I also tweaked the layout of some of the individual posts on the Thriftway site.
Posted by Wulf on March 31, 2009, 9:39 am with 0 comments - Permalink
Friday 27th
Spent a lot of time today finetuning and finalising the Flash Rotator I had first developed upon starting my placement with Thriftway. It can now be seen on the Thriftway Travel Site. It's not quite perfect, but it is functional.
In addition to this I threw together a quick "now searching" flash animation for the inline flight search. We had identified problems with the gif file, as it froze on certain browsers once another page began loading. The flash one, however, just keeps on going, which lets the end user see that something is going on.
I have also been working on restructuring the individual posts layouts to a more appealing layout. I hope to finalize these on Monday and get them rolled out.
I have a rather lengthy list of mini-projects to kep me busy once that's done and out of the way. Included in these are:
- Implement a Hotel Search and Insurance section into the Thriftway Site
- Finish layouts for individual posts
- Set up a blog for staff to post on
- Produce a site for Thriftway Travel's English brand, Capricorn Travel
- Design window posters for the retail section
- Finalise jQuery search engine
I also gave a presentation yesterday as part of my FDMM course. It included a workshop which looked at aspects of the Thriftway site, which has provided us with plenty of feedback to take into consideration for further developments to the site. All in all, it looks like next week will have plenty to keep me busy.
Posted by Wulf on March 27, 2009, 5:26 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
