$(’squonk’).reallyLoves(jQuery);
It all started late one night, as my eyes started to droop and the letters on my laptop screen began to run together; I had run into a third straight job requiring a number of trivial Javascript effects that had to degrade gracefully, and as I agonized over the dry arcana that Google had spat out at me, I came across the excellent jQuery for Designers Tutorial by Mark Panay. (You should read it if you’re looking for a great primer for this holiest of JS libraries.) I’ve read a lot of insight into Javascript techniques and libraries in particular, but Mark has a really good point, and touches upon the reason I love jQuery: I’m using Javascript because jQuery tricked me into it.
The thing is, I’m not really a designer myself. I leave that up to my some of my partners in crime who can draw. In my company’s home site at SquonkStudios.com (freshly re-launched today), I’ve decided on a tasty blend of jQuery and Wordpress. The static site structure is built within the brand-spanking new WP 2.7 framework (Coltrane). There were some real issues with the upgrade I did, but that’s for a later post. Right now it seems to be behaving. It’s a major rewrite, and if that kind of stuff turns you on, I’m sure the dev blog is buzzing. Using jQuery’s AJAX functionality and an incredible thematic visual concept devised by Joe Alterio, Squonk’s better-looking half, the goal was to create something flashy without Flash, a website that is user-friendly but also interesting to look at. In short, while the site isn’t a work of perfection, we wanted people to remember it after seeing it.
If you visited earlier than today, then you probably know that the earlier site, which was not built within Wordpress, was a first attempt with a lot of problems. Let’s just call it a beta. I’ve taken in a lot of feedback, which was well-appreciated, and we’ve worked to make the site load faster and to make the content more accessible, not just to users but also search engines. From an animation standpoint, we’re making full use of the Cycle, Background Position and UI-Tabs jQuery plugins to deliver our content, and while we think it’s all pretty nice to look at, the advantages behind it go beyond simply being eye candy. Loading content via AJAX and making it look like the site itself is all on one large board allows us to construct a narrative out of our corporate jabber. Just the same, every page is a landing page, so entry points are multiple. Maybe this is a little high-handed for a marketing site, but I’m kinda new at this. I’ll let you know if it loses me any customers.
At any rate, this site is, much like Google Chrome, fresh out of beta, but we’re not done working on it just yet. Multiple additions and improvements are planned, but right now I gotta go Christmas shopping.
