Webpage Department

AJD Productions Presents:

LGCSD Technology Department

   
Unlike other pages that have been completed, the Lake George Central School District Technology Department page's shining features are some of the design elements incorporated into the page.
  
I had been playing around with the sidebar for a while in Photoshop for while way before I started working on the Tech Department's page.  It was an interesting idea I had with modeling the sidebar after a case with an LCD display screen.  As with other pages, Javascript made the magic happen.  When your mouse hovers above one of the links/panels, a small description of what kind of content to expect appears in the LCD screen, courtesy of a mouseover image replacement.  It turned out to be an effective design feature.  However, it does have its downside.  Due to the number of images used and the file size of each one, the download time on various kinds of net connections is sometimes not pretty.  It's not really ideal for a high-traffic page, so I probably won't use this design idea again.
  
One feature that I wasn't sure if I could pull off or not was the post-it note.  I wasn't sure if it would turn out looking realistic look (what I was shooting for), or cartoonish, which clashed against some of the other design elements.  Once again, Photoshop came to the rescue and I was quite pleased with the end result.  Should the need arise, I probably will use the post-it note idea again.
  
The animated gifs were another design element I don't normally use, but again, was please with the end result.  The pictures flipping through on the monitor in the center of the banner bar are all pictures of various places where technology is present within the LGCSD.  The crossfading logo idea came about when discussing what logo to put up for the LGCSD.  There was no logo for the school district itself, but there were separate logos for the two schools.  If there was only one logo for one of the schools on the page, the other school would want theirs up as well.  So, to make everybody happy, I stuck both on the page in a crossfade animation.  I was afraid that I'd loose some quality because of the gif's 256-color limitation, but thanks to dithering, it turned out fine.
  
As for some of the content, the Tech Tips Page was something that took some time to do.  I had to sit down and break down everything step-by-step so that people who were still relatively unfamiliar with computers could still follow the procedures and complete the tasks that they wanted to get done.  These FAQ's both helped out users on the LGCSD network and the members of staff who worked in the tech department by alleviating the number of times people came in with the same questions over and over again.
  
For the most part, I was pleased with the way this page turned out.  Yes, there is definitely room for improvement (there always is, after you get past the "it's new" and "wow" factors), but as it stands, it resulted in an interesting design.
  

--Adam Deutschmann

AJD Productions
 

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