Finally Done!!!!!

Here is the final Flash build for Master Joe's Sushi .   I took a lot of the classes suggestions during the mid term review and put them in effect. My biggest challenge was coming up with something to do with the button feature. I decided to do a roll over button where the piece of the roll would light up. I liked the way it came out. Next I had a ugly title header that was basically the logo plopped on to the page. After playing with it for awhile and taking Josephs suggestion I made a kind of water mark. I tried having one big one or a bunch of little ones in a pattern. I asked a couple people and the big logo in the corner came out to look the best. I made a better looking text for the top of the frame in photo shop and dropped it on as a png. I think it has a better look. Then I got rid of all the ugly brown borders I had and replaced them with a bamboo mat image with a drop shadow as suggested. I think the effect came out really well after I dropped the opacity down a bit. For the pop up windows I felt the transitions where a bit too fast and rough. I didn't want to redo the whole thing because each window is on one frame, so I added in some AS code to make a alpha fade in. I removed the ugly black box that was on the lower half by making a mask of the top half and flipping it. Finally instead of publishing it in flash , I added the swf to a HTML page in Dream weaver and centered it and added some background color with some css. I have been taking the CSS w3schools classes because I think that is a real weakness of mine but im learning a bit more with every site I do. All and all I think it came out really well once I added the suggestions given to me. I will be working on more sites really soon,

Almost Complete

I'm almost done with the flash project for master joes, should post results by the end of this week. I should joe and hand drawn mock up for his new site and he has approved it. Now im waiting to hear from his wife for the ok and the new menu they want up.

mid term

I showed my mid term to the class and got some really good feed back. I liked the idea of using a bamboo background for the main swf and using a bit of drop shadow to give the pop up windows depth. I'm going to get with a guy I work with monday about using photoshop to slice some parts of the pictures to make buttons out of them seamlessly. I showed my boss the sushi map and he liked it. He wants me to add some music to it so I have to find some Japanese music and a player to play it. He asked me tonight to get started on the other restaurant so I guess he liked it, For teh next one I'm going to go back to basics and build a simple html web site with some flash embedded into it. I'm going to look at other asian style web sites for restaurants to get some idea

This week I have learned how difficult it is getting media from a client. I have been bugged about putting up more images for the restaurant site I have been working on. I told them that if they took there own pictures it would save them money and me. After a week of talking about it I finally set up meeting with them to take pictures on sunday myself and they canceled on me. I am planing on doing a actionscript picture map for some of the food. I have been looking at some code and examples and it seems like it will be somewhat simple. I will add buttons on certain parts of the images that will set a loader and unload in mouse click. Clicking the button will pop up a image with a description of the food. That movie clip will be a sort of button so if you click it , it will unload. I wont know how difficult it will be tho untill i start it and i cant start it till i get the images from the owner.

My Current Work. Feb 11th

This is the project I have had to work on this week http://masterjoessushi.com/

Its a upscale sushi restaurant that I work for. I have been using wordpress to get it done because I am working for cheap and on my own time to do it. Working on this project has further shown me the need for a more flexible system for web development than what I am using. Although it is a pretty theme, hacking the source code and permissions in the data base have lead to more problems down the road. I have had to /cmod a lot of the permissions which has lead to the internal editor screwing up for me which has been a pain. I re sized and colored all the pictures I have been given, added a facebook link with a a herf= added a google maps html link. there are a bunch of minor tweeks I would like to do but think digging through the core will be more trouble than it is worth. I will finish the rest when the client provides more pictures. I'm looking foward to building my next site purely in dreamweaver and adding the tags and snippets from the cms. It will be more of my own. I'm also going to start building sites in a virtual enviroment on my computer rather than working on them live on the server

Proposal

I have been thinking exactly what direction I have wanted to go with my senior digital project. Through the past few years I have jumped from a bunch of different things that I thought I wanted to do but always end up to learn a little of each skill set becoming a jack of all trades master of none. This last year though I seem to be spending a lot of time on web development. I have gone through a bunch of tutorials on virtual machine hosting, content management systems, search engines, and data bases. I find although I can understand a lot of code when necessary to do what I need, I have very weak design and function understanding of html and css. I have my own server to host sites and a couple of real world projects I can work on so I propose building a html/css site from scratch. Then using that as my template to add to a CMS and adding functionality with Java and or Flash. The site I will first work on will most likely be for a Asian restaurant that will give me the opportunity to use some artistic flare and perhaps build 2-3 different self built themes that can be changed. I will be using sites like w3schools The Coding Pad and NetNuts+ to name a few. Hopefully this, along with my other commercial jobs, will be enough to start a portfolio under my own website.