/design /mmott.com v2.0β

06.07.09

Following a brief existence of mmott.com 1.0 we completely redesigned the site to provide easier access to the portfolio. We also took the opportunity to make the site completely AJAX driven. Using jQuery we animated the site and load the contents in the background directly into the page. The site, however, works both with and without javascript, in the latter case reverting to a static website again.

mmott.com

Clearly this process did require quite some tinkering. The site contains a fair amount of javascript to, for example, power animations, employ ajax loading, and load flash objects. To be able to activate all these scripts, even on content loaded through ajax we relied heavily on the live events in jQuery, to bind handlers to future event and to be able to intercept links and load the content using AJAX.

The site is build on the WordPress platform. While WordPress is both powerful and flexible, we ran into its limits on several occasions. The standard implementation of next and previous post, which I used to navigate through the posts in given categories, does not work when posts are categorized under multiple categories. And for small visual aids like the counter in the portfolio that displays the number of the post out of the total number of posts within that particular category, we expanded on the code by SJRM on http://wordpress.org/support/topic/245629. With these and a couple of other tweaks we got the site up and running, showcasing not only our work but the possibilities of jQuery, AJAX and WordPress alike.

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