UWindsor

I recently finished up a project for the University of Windsor, hereinafter referred to as UWindsor. It was actually a very smooth project and I liked my team immensely.

If you know of me as a Flash Developer (or have read previous posts of this blog), you'll know I love using XML as a way of handling content. Thanks to a heads up from Alex Davis, I've started using XPath in Flash. Jen deHaan has a nice little article here explaining it's usage. It really is a time saver. No more looping through childNodes yourself.

Anyway, UWindsor wanted a site to pull in prospective students by showing them the university from the student's perspectives. Using testimonials from current students gave a voice to the site that would have been sorely lacking otherwise.


You get to the site from an email from UWindsor, since they control the url, we added in their first name as a greeting using base64 encoding and decoding. In this example, aGFuZGJhbmFuYQ== becomes handbanana.




The two guides, are equal on the main page. once you select either path "The School" or "The Scene" that guide increases in size, reinforcing the path you chose.





It was apparent early on that users are used to picking what they want when they want it. So we provided users with a video gallery of all videos used in the site.





This is what the photo asset looks like and it's xml node that triggers it.





This is what the text asset looks like and it's xml node that triggers it.





This is what the video asset looks like and it's xml node that triggers it.