Design Notes \ Downloads

December 2006

       The design challenges that we faced during the development of the Downloads section was quite something, because we were not able to get any where with it. The downloads section is the next important section after Solutions and Tutorials. It acts as a portal for our Design and Software Developments.

       We first thought about implementing AJAX to populate the contents. Although the idea was seamless and could cut down development and modification time, we had some browser compatability issues whilst testing. So we decided to go the long way.

       

     First up was to design the layout for the section. Then we had to choose the colors. At first a light shade of violet was chosen , but we reverted to follow the color scheme of the last version of the site, Orange and Brown. The subnavigation was seamlessly integrated with the content part of the page. Space for The random Wallpaper was given. The content display part has a look of a content box, with a light drop shadow around. It's rounded corners make it stand out. It was a simple job in creating the header image displayed on the top. The main navigation for the site and the footer follows the same drop-shadow and rounded edges feature.

     Next, we implemented CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for finalising the layout. It took us about 8 hours of work to complete this section. Using styles was a lot of help in reducing the development time. Oh and we used Adobe (Macromedia) Fireworks 8 to design the layout of the section.

Done at AE Labs.