Well still working on server FTP access as the password seems to be harder to acquire than anticipated. But in the mean time I went ahead and started a new animated and improved version of AFishStore.com for our friends in Sumter. Added some animated bubbles coming up from below in addition to a ‘splash down’ beginning sequence. Really happy with the design so far, but of course there is a lot to polish before it is finished.
Here’s a png – ‘day-one’ check it out (the art and frame work took two days so far)
Here’s a png – ‘day-two’ check it out (this took two days so far)
Day Three of this design adds a second animated layer of larger bubbles in addition to a contact us page, a map and directions page and a customer review page. A Fish Store of Sumter regularly receives RAVE REVIEWS from it customers and I think this kind of thing belongs on their website for sure. (spent most of the day fixing IE compatibility bug).
Here’s a pic linked to the site in progress on my server:
Spent part of the day working on a pearl v5 script ‘email.cgi’ that authenticates form fields and then sends their contents to selected email boxes. Then I built a nice looking, simple and semi transparent email form for A Fish Stores contact us page. I added a little more facial expression to the logo fish in the banner and some bubbles. Expanded the background to stretch across up to 3000px wide screens (covers my giant iMac and then some) and ran into problems with iPhone rendering the background properly. I added additional instructions to the head of each page filtering out smart phones by screen resolution and directing them to a different css style sheet for proper rendering (similar to what you do with Microsofts buggy IE browsers -we all hate – to get things to work but applied in reverse).
A long day – here are the results:
Okay day five here and we’re pretty much wrapping it up. There may be some photo’s from the store to add in later but they will have to be added when they are available as yet they are not so we will publish what we have. 10 pages total including a form sent successfully redirect and an incomplete form ‘go back and fill in empty fields’ redirect. My last day on this project included finishing touches on the graphics, adding a favicon.ico 
All ten pages are optimized for their topic where relevant to the sites them or ‘nofollow’ where there was no relevance in order to prevent dilution of the websites focus from a search engines point of view. (redirects = nofollow)
Here’s a last look at the graphics that went into this fun little website design:
first this was built in Illustrator
then in Photoshop real sky added above and real water below (w/ added details)
fold and expand so that it wraps around infinitely in a browser
back to Illustrator again for the banner and fishy the mascot fish
more illustrator for moving bubbles small and big
add javascript for motion, css for formatting and a pearl cgi script to access sendmail on the server
Google Earth rocks!
I photoshopped the center pic on this one adding some extra fish
theres more – go to their web site if you want to see the rest. Here’s some stuff you wont see incorporated into the fishy design but experimented with…
This was a really fun project and turned out pretty much just like I wanted it too. I tried some very realistic background fish and animals in the visual theme but they just distracted from the desired focal point and basically stole the show. The cartoon fish works well as a branding icon and logo in addition to NOT stealing the show. This theme reminds me of a children’s book by Helen Palmer about a fish that ate too much and grew too big.
on to Saluda BHS for now…