11 September 2009

abcGIS

As Ian mentioned on his blog last Sunday we have now completed our first contract under our new company abcGIS. The deadline for the entire project was today, but as usual a certain person was out of the country for the last few weeks and so the written outputs of the project are going to be delayed until at least Monday. Thankfully we have finished our role - making a website to display the maps that were the outcomes of the study in addition to providing a quick summary of the aims and methods.

It's been a hectic few weeks and we've been programming in what are entirely new languages for me. Some big things worked surprisingly quickly and some little things took hours and hours.

As always there were a few things I wanted to do, but gave up on in the end. For example the banner of images on the left hand side will only fit the text when viewed on certain sized monitors. Otherwise either the text goes beyond the images or vice versa. I could of course repeat the images to fit the space (as with the banners at the top and bottom), but then that would result in only part of a photo at the bottom and in my opinion that would look even worse. Suggestions anyone on how to deal with this in the future?

Unfortunately the end of this project means that I have to spend some time revising one of my papers that I've submitted for publication. This will be the 4th time I've revised it since I first submitted it. Fingers crossed that it is 4th time lucky...

2 comments:

Mark said...

I'm not sure there is any way of repeating the images down the left without ending up cutting an image in half. Basically you never know how tall the area will be so you can't really stop the image at any point. I suppose what you could do would be to put the image as the CSS background tiled vertically and then place a semi-transparent image at the bottom so that instead of an image just stopping it is gradually faded out.

Having said all that given that you've used tables instead of divs for the layout some of that could well be a bit tricky anyway.

It all looks pretty good though and congrats on finishing the first (I assume paying) contract!

Helen said...

Cheers Mark. The html was a bit rushed - spent most of our time on the javascript stuff. Definitely need to brush up on css etc before the next contract (assuming that there is one!)

Definitely looking forward to getting paid :-)