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The Planning

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The Planning

The first step was to get with the client (phone and e-mail) and determine what his vision for the site was and what kind of services he wanted to provide. One of the first things that needed to be defined was the purpose of the site and what the client wanted to accomplish. The main purpose is to educate the public about the preservation of migratory species, sensitive breeding habitats, and endangered ecosystems. Habitat Alert provides a way to educate the public including children. It also accepts donations and sells a few items to raise money.

The author team then began to collaborate. After the authors had a feel for what was needed, they kicked around ideas about how to give the client what he needed and made other suggestions. In the end, the main site features included the following components :

  • A mission statement.

  • An information area to inform users about the current and past fight to save the herons.

  • A children's section to inform, entertain , and teach children how to participate in the endeavor. Some of the features included a quiz to test their knowledge, puzzles of the herons, and information about how to petition and participate in the cause.

  • An online petition that can be signed.

  • E-cards that visitors can send to friends as an awareness feature.

  • Shopping carts to sell small items to raise funds.

  • A section for accepting donations.

You will develop many of these sections throughout this book. There are some areas such as a shopping cart that go beyond the focus of this book. But check the links page on the CD for recommendations.



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Site Mockup

Mockups can be done in FreeHand or in Fireworks. FreeHand is great for multiple-page mockups and is a great tool for animation storyboards. Because Ron Rockwell (author of the FreeHand chapters) had enough to do with the graphic development, the mockup was done in Fireworks. Plus the majority of the graphics were bitmaps and best suited to be worked on in Fireworks. The client was then presented with two different color schemes. Donna Casey (author of the Dreamweaver chapters) met with the client in person and already knew the design style the client liked (she had samples from her portfolio) so it was simply a matter of color choices.

A list of categories was developed based on the client's needs and a flowchart was drawn out. Since the mockup was already basically done in Fireworks and already laid out in Dreamweaver the authors created a flowchart using the Site panel. Flowcharts can be made in Dreamweaver, FreeHand, and Fireworks.



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Division of Labor

The next step was to decide who would do what. One of the first priorities was getting the graphics done. First the illustrations in FreeHand needed to be done, because most of the site relies on these. The authors decided that the logo and vectors for the e-cards would be done in FreeHand, not only because FreeHand has the most robust vector capabilities but because Ron Rockwell is a fantastic illustrator. He also did the layout for the business cards, brochures , and a few cartoon-type movies.

Joyce Evans was responsible for making the e-cards, adding sound, and preparing the Flash assets for the site. For the most part, she used the vectors that Ron had drawn instead of making new drawings in Flash, not because Flash is inferior but because she's not an artist. Doug Sahlin then incorporated the e-cards into a Flash interface, which connects to ColdFusion (Charles Mohnike wrote the ColdFusion section). Charles Mohnike did the ColdFusion coding of the e-cards and Doug did the Flash remoting.

Joyce was responsible for preparing all additional graphics in Fireworks (supplied by the client and Donna), optimizing, slicing, and exporting. The files also had to be exported into the proper folders for use in Dreamweaver to facilitate round-trip editing. Because of the book the authors did, at times, do things several different ways. For instance, the rollovers were created in Dreamweaver, but the authors show you how to do them in Fireworks as well as how to insert that code directly in a Dreamweaver layout.

Donna did the layout in Dreamweaver. She had direct contact with the client and she did the actual mockups of the site. Charles recommended using only one server technology, which of course was ColdFusion. But the authors also wanted to show you how you could connect to a database by using ASP. So as an alternative Donna shows you how to build an administrator section using ASP and an Access database to manage a contacts list. A newsletter was also developed and would be deployed using ColdFusion.

Charles was responsible for connecting all the dynamic data using ColdFusion. The newsletter, e-cards, petition, and shopping cart are all powered by ColdFusion. Only the e-cards are covered in this book.



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