I designed and created this website at CTD studio, with very little budget and with a very little time available. The main task was to find a way for Felix to update his website quickly and easily.

Visit felixpacker.co.uk

The website connects dynamically to the database for each subsection of the portfolio. The images for each section are then retrieved only upon request. By doing this we avoid downloading a big XML file in the beginning containing the information for all the images and therefore reducing the loading time.

The Content Management System

The flash application makes use of PHP scripts that return queries in a XML format which are then parsed and displayed using Actionscript. In this CMS there isn’t the possibility of adding new sections but given the architecture of the database it’s a feature that could easily be added in the future.

From a design point of view it was mandatory to keep the navigation as smooth as possible to allow seamless modifications to the model. Popups and modal windows are only displayed to add or delete an image while all the PHP calls are done in the background.Images are automatically resized in upload and loaded into flash to give the user the chance to generate its own thumb.Once one is happy with the position, the bitmapdata inside the rectangle is encoded in JPG using ByteArray and JPGEncoder and then uploaded to the server.

Here is a video that shows what the CMS looks like: