Case Studies - thedetour.net

Website Address: www.thedetour.net

Technology: HTML, CSS, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, mySQL

Features

• On-location photography and video.
• Logo, poster, and business card designs.
• Content Management System
• Custom forum design.

The Idea
To create an attractive website for a low budget, startup ministry, with the purpose of encouraging visitors to not only engage in an online conversation about spiritual topics, but also allow a means to do so.

The Proposition
Through a series of meetings, we found that a flash site with a custom database driven content management system would service the need of attracting visitors to the site, and also provide a user-friendly method for the owners to manage the site themselves.

Through continued consulting, all parties agreed that a custom forum would be necessary in order to facilitate the site’s purpose of hosting a place for online conversations. This is due to the type of security model that the site administrators desired, and the ability to control certain aspects of the forum, that would not have been cost-effective to re-build into a packaged forum implementation.

The Method
The design team worked through a number of ideas before settling on a design built completely in flash. The site was built to be content rich. Flash was the obvious choice for the delivery of all the media content the owners desired. The site delivers pictures through a custom browser, streams video, and includes a custom media player for the web-site soundtrack.

Development of the dynamic Flash front-end took place in parallel with the design of the site, not only to assure usability of the site, but also to allow appropriate space allocation for the varying amounts of content.

A challenge we encountered during development was the communication that had to take place between the flash movies, and a database. Not only this, but movies must resize based upon the amount of information loaded into it. At this time, the Flash communication server was still in development, so we designed our own Flash communication object to allow an interface between Flash ActionScript, and PHP scripts on the server. The PHP scripts in turn communicated with a MySQL database. We utilized PHP scripts to read data from the MySQL database before loading in order to see what dimensions the Flash movie should be loaded at on each page.

Additional Development
The custom forum implementation required a custom security model which we developed with PHP pages against the same database as the front-end. This allowed a type of all-in-one feel, since users can easily navigate between PHP pages and Flash pages, seamlessly.

The back-end of the site brings the management of the Flash pages and the forum together in one intuitive interface. Site Administrators not only have the ability to manage the front-end and the forum content effortlessly, but also the ability to setup new Security Groups with the custom Security Right management, so they can allow any given user the ability to do as much or as little as they desire.

At Present
The site is considered by all parties to be a success, forum use and traffic continues to grow, and the site is completely manageable by thedetour.net staff, with little to no maintenance by our team