Cool Site I made

[clonk]

I thought you might be interested to check out the site I made that launched this evening.

http://www.letter-photo.com

This site was built for a client of ours (I work for a company called Orajen - http://www.orajen.com). The client goes around and takes pictures of things that look like letters and then lets you assemble a word from their letter collection. There are other sites / companies out there that do the same thing but I think our work is the best of the bunch.

The design work is not mine (it was done by our in house designer), I was 'merely' the developer on the project. The site is built in ASP.NET / c# and the client side stuff leverages scriptaculous. The shopping cart was built in house by me for this project.

There have been hundreds of hours put into this project and I have a lot of pride in the work so I wanted to show it off a little :)

[MrFuji]

Good idea, as the site is easy to use and fun, people will want to send things to friends. :yes:

Haha, I just did that without having read your post :p

[Echilon]

Great layout, and really interesting application. :)

[Farstrider]

TBH when people at this forum post something like this it is often not really professional or even finished! But I have to say, wow, did I have a surprise in store when I got to the site! Really very, very nice indeed! One can be critical of certain things, but that I am not going to do! I am really impressed, it looks like lots of thought and hard work went into this. Again, nice work, it's one of the better looking sites that I've been to for a long while. Keep up the good work! :yes:

[clonk]

TBH when people at this forum post something like this it is often not really professional or even finished! But I have to say, wow, did I have a surprise in store when I got to the site! Really very, very nice indeed! One can be critical of certain things, but that I am not going to do! I am really impressed, it looks like lots of thought and hard work went into this. Again, nice work, it's one of the better looking sites that I've been to for a long while. Keep up the good work! :yes:

Thanks for the kind words. I am curious though what your criticisms of the site are. Voicing them will only help me do it better in the long run. And besides, if I end up agreeing with you I just might change it :)

[Dev Null Zen]

Looks like this would be a good place to use silverlight. Just a thought.

[Farstrider]

@Clonk:

One can be critical of certain things, but that I am not going to do!

By this I actually meant that these sorts of things are very subjective and people, who view the site, can nitpick and tell the creator/designer to perhaps change this or that, but in essence a website is an artistic expression and can be subjected to many different points of view! The one thing that you can recognise immediately is if thought and effort has been put into the project! In my opinion, this is clearly what I saw when viewing the web site and because of that, I think you have produced a terrific web site. The last thing that I might add is that a web site is never finished, new ideas, innovation and constant review is always necessary!

[MaceX]

Did you use any asp components like GridView or Repeater when you developed it, or do you prefer not to use the asp controls? I like the data controls because if there is empty data then it will just display the empty template. Otherwise I would have to have if statements in my asp page or something more complicated. I prefer to keep any code out of the asp page and put it in the code behind, but sometimes it can be frustrating trying to separate the two in complicated situations.

I like how when dragging items to the letter art area maintains its state through page transitions. Do you maintain the state through ajax or do you set a cookie?

Edited July 8, 2008 by MaceX

[clonk]

Did you use any asp components like GridView or Repeater when you developed it, or do you prefer not to use the asp controls? I like the data controls because if there is empty data then it will just display the empty template. Otherwise I would have to have if statements in my asp page or something more complicated. I prefer to keep any code out of the asp page and put it in the code behind, but sometimes it can be frustrating trying to separate the two in complicated situations.

I like how when dragging items to the letter art area maintains its state through page transitions. Do you maintain the state through ajax or do you set a cookie?

I did use controls where appropriate, yes. For example, on the home page, there are two repeaters in use. The first is used to generate the categories, or tabs, of letters you can choose from in the carousel. The second is used to generate the javascript that powers the client side behavior of switching between categories with the scriptaculous effects and ajax callls. The top navigation is generated by a custom control I developed to generated navigation ideal for styling with css. The forms all use the standard validator controls (including a custom validator or two). The photo gallery on the interior is a custom control that reads the images in a given directory and spits them out like that, using the exif info to generate the titles and descriptions.

To your comment about keeping code in the codebehind, yes I make this a requirement of my development.

Since I chose to use scriptaculous for effects, it made sense to use prototype for my ajax needs over the .net ajax controls. I do however, use the the UpdatePanel often in other situations on different sites. With using prototype, I was 'forced' to think about the html i wanted to be generated in certain areas (like when you drag a letter down or change your word's layout). So I chose to use a set generic handlers (.ashx) that processed the ajax requests and output the appropriate html. I believe there are 7 or 8 of these handlers in use for the front page.

Whenever a change to the word is made on the client side, this change is persisted to the server through the mentioned ajax calls. On the server I maintain a Word object that stores the state of the word (there are Letter objects as well). This Word is stored in the user's session.

EDIT - I also make use of the LoginBox, LoginView, Gridview (with the css adapters) and repeaters in the 'admin' section of the site.

Edited July 8, 2008 by clonk

[clonk]

Looks like this would be a good place to use silverlight. Just a thought.

This is a good suggestion and is something I considered early on. Ultimately I chose the pure html + ajax approach because:

1) I was intrigued at the challenge of building this interface and having it work cross browser. (Letter photo works everywhere I have tested back to IE6. Granted things aren't as pretty because I couldn't apply the alpha hack to some transparent png's for functional reasons, it works just fine.)

2) My superiors would not have allowed silverlight to be used for this project because it does not have a wide enough install base yet, and in their eyes a plugin or technology that does not have a majority installation base should not be used.

[4CxbqFxVnstmA Veteran]

This is a good suggestion and is something I considered early on. Ultimately I chose the pure html + ajax approach because:

1) I was intrigued at the challenge of building this interface and having it work cross browser. (Letter photo works everywhere I have tested back to IE6. Granted things aren't as pretty because I couldn't apply the alpha hack to some transparent png's for functional reasons, it works just fine.)

2) My superiors would not have allowed silverlight to be used for this project because it does not have a wide enough install base yet, and in their eyes a plugin or technology that does not have a majority installation base should not be used.

I for one am glad you didn't use silverlight as I couldn't go to your site with Linux at all. It's not even a question of installing it or not installing it. I wouldn't mind installing it if there was a Linux version. I think you are wise to stick to universally available solutions. :D

[clonk]

@Clonk: In my opinion, this is clearly what I saw when viewing the web site and because of that, I think you have produced a terrific web site. The last thing that I might add is that a web site is never finished, new ideas, innovation and constant review is always necessary!

Thank you, it is much appreciated.

Farstrider, I agree with you whole heartedly on a website never being finished. This inst printing a book. Unfortunately, as I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, this site is entirely contracted work for a client of ours. Even though I am very attached to the project and my code, the site itself is not mine, and what has been done was done for a set bid. Any further work done will need to be requested, and paid for, by the client.

With that said, they have requested a 'Phase 2' bid be prepared, so my time from letter-photo may be shorter than I imagined.

[AnthonySterling]

Great site, loving the originality!