As mentioned in my previous post, Diamondbrite is my first HTML website in 5 years. 😀
The purpose of this post is to demystify the various technologies used in this website, so that even if you are a newbie trying to build a website for the first time, you can take this post as a point of reference to the various technologies already available to you.
It serves a secondary purpose to encourage you that even under a tight deadline, leveraging the right tools can also get you up to speed to building standards compliant websites that are both SEO friendly and accessible to a larger audience. 😉
With the given ten days deadline, four days were used to read up on XHTML and CSS, and the next two days on jQuery. I emphasized on spending quality time to read up these as I believe a strong foundation will make haste in development later.
While developing the website, I leveraged on the existing jQuery engine with ThickBox, a jQuery plugin that supports iframed content. This eliminates the need for pop-ups which might be blocked by the end-user, not to mention that it’s aesthetically more attractive as well. 😀
Other tools include the jQuery plugin Tooltip by bassistance.de, and the JavaScript Form Validator from JavaScript-Coder.com, which I found was both easy to understand and implement.
The final phase saw me removing Flash generated codes used to embed swf files into HTML, by using SWFObject, an easy-to-use and standards-friendly method to embed Flash content.
Looking back, the entire development cycle was a very fun and exciting journey while learning new things everyday, albeit intensive.
You can check the completed website over at www.diamondbrite.com.sg.