Applecore Portfolio
Maxxim Vacations
Screen shots
Two column home page with lots going on
A flash object, a form, rounded corners side-by-side
A three column sub page
A photo gallery with right-hand navigation
The dream vacation
Nicely displayed tabular data
A fat table
A skinny table
And another skinny table
Rounded-cornered callout boxes that fit the size of their contents
Challenges / Solutions
Maxxim Vacations was my first serious project at Applecore. It was to be built in .net and I hadn't done a design implmentation for a .net site before this one. I felt like my standards-based methods were being put to a test. Would my methods translate easily for a .net programmer? On top of .net I had a 4-page template to implement, a form and a lot of navigation. I took a deep breath and stuck to a very strict design process I had tried out called coloured boxes. I had the two column layout implemented in no time and then I adjusted it easily to create a third column. The static site was almost pixel-perfect. I zipped the files and handed them over to the programmer.
As the site was coming together and content started to be entered, the design requirements started to change. The callout boxes that the designer assured me would never need to stretch, well needed to stretch. Oh, and that fixed-width table with the rounded corners needs to be skinny sometimes and fat other times and still needs to have rounded corners. It took a bit of time, but I met every challenge that popped up. The site really benefitted from a table-less layout. There were so many changes to the design after I had implemented it that had it been cut-up to fit a bunch of nested tables, all the images would have had to have been re-sliced and re-diced. Div's to the rescue, I say and yes standards even work with a .net site!
Also, near the end of it all, the project manager says, "Oh, we need to be able to have a print icon on almost every page. Can you make it print?". Yes, I can.
media="print"
Credits:
- All content, design and development by Applecore Interactive
- See it for yourself at maxximvacations.ca and don't forget to try out the print icon.