| Morning Music |
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When creating a new page for Morning Music Infinity Media Services was faced with quite a challenge. There was much content to deal with and it was obvious from the beginning that a very clear navigational structure needed to be employed. The major concern with the old Morning Music site was that you could very easily get lost, and we did not want this happening with the new site. For this reason, the site is divided into two categories, Production Music (stock music) and Publishing. We wanted to allow users to navigate freely through these sections without feeling lost or cut of from one or the other based on where they were in the navigation of the site. We broke the site map down into three main categories: Production Music, Publication and Other. We then implemented a flash-based menu, which allows users to switch between the publication and production sides of the site with ease. The default behavior for this menu is to load the intro page for each section whenever the change occurs. Users can modify this setting on the Site Design page so that no page change follows a menu change, allowing them to freely access any page from any other page. Another concern of Morning Music’s was the ability to easily update content on the site. For this reason we implemented our own custom news feed scripts into the site. These scripts handle the content for the production music news, publishing news, and new releases, and automatically publishes said content using RSS syndication. Morning Music's staff members simply sign in, add, remove or modify content and the site and RSS feed are automatically updated. Their clients can also now be constantly updated about what the newest releases are for any stock music library. For the remaining pages we have simply used php based ‘includes’ to load any body content into each page. This way Morning Music can easily modify any page’s content without the risk of accidentally destroying the navigation or otherwise ‘breaking’ the site. Morning Music’s logo is an absolute classic, very 1970’s. We wanted to jazz it up a bit, so we made it into a vector file and experimented a bit with the colors. At first we were thinking pure black, red and yellow, but in the end we settled on a more muted color in favor of not appearing as if the logo had to POP off the page. We went with clean smooth edges and flowing curves for the body design and I made a blue theme to match the red and yellow in the logo. Firefox is definitely the browser of choice for this site. I have added some special features for any browsers with proper, up-to-date, CSS implementation. If you are running Internet Explorer, do yourself and the internet a favor and switch to any other browser really. I highly recommend Firefox. There are many reasons for IE’s terrible state, but if you are running a PC on the internet you are VERY vulnerable to viruses and other attacks regardless whether or not you have a virus program. Running Internet Explorer is like unlocking and opening your back door, then going on a vacation to Florida right after buying a brand new plasma TV and stereo system. You really are asking for it. Don’t believe me? Check out this study which shows that IE is ‘publicly vulnerable’ about 98% of the time. Enough about why you should have Firefox and back to what you will get when running Morning Music’s site on Firefox, or Safari, or Netscape 8+, or even IE7, but you don’t want to go there.
For users of standards compliant browsers the following extras will be available:
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