Aurlaw Solutions was created in 1998 as my production name when I enrolled at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh. In the fall of 1998 I developed a one page website featuring my resume and links to two other websites I created, which are no longer in existence. It was originally hosted on a free web host, Angelfire, but due to numerous pop-up ads, I eventually moved to Earthlink.
Earthlink provided me 10MB of banner-free space as part of my ISP package. Even though I've embraced Microsoft's ASP and .NET technologies I wanted to work more with open-source technologies, mainly PHP. Earthlink doesn't allow any server-side programming like PHP or CGI with its free package, so I needed to find a commercial host. In June 2002, I began the transition of aurlaw.com from Earthlink to iPowerWeb, which offered more services at a lower price.
The majority of the site's content is dynamically driven. I developed two versions: a Standard HTML site and a Flash-enhanced site. The majority of the content is stored in XML, with projects and screen shots stored in a MySQL database, and the rest is hard-coded HTML. Any content changes are made in one central location, either XML or MySQL to allow scalability.
Beginning in the middle of spring of 2003, I began to overhaul both sites. Starting with the Enhanced site, I decided to develop a fully integrated Flash site to take advantage of Flash MX's capabilities and potential as a development tool. Also, I wanted an opportunity to experiment and be creative in my design.
Each section is separated into external SWF files and loaded when called upon to help reduce bandwidth needed to load the initial site. Since the majority of the content is stored in a separate, structured format, MySQL and XML, future updates need only be made to these documents thus eliminating the need to recompile the flash files and re-upload to the server.
One major issue I had to deal with was keeping the Browser's Back button from breaking the site, as would happen in flash sites developed before Flash MX. I decided not to use Macromedia's "Built-in" named Anchors for navigation because they would not work properly in the "Gecko-based" browsers.
I decided to use the LocalConnection Object and created a separate "Receiver" movie to handle all navigation calls and communicate them to the main movie. As a result, users can still navigate using the Browsers Back and Forward buttons as they would any other HTML site.
As for the Standard Site, I've decided to work closely with the standards set by the W3C and to develop a standards-compliant website that will not break in future generations of web browsers. In addition to the W3C, I also cite The Web Standards Project as an important resource to ensure my future projects remain compliant and useable on many different platforms. The Standard Site is validated XHTML 1.0 Transitional for the markup and CSS for the layout.