Thea's Galleria: RNZAF

Royal New Zealand Air Force
...without Frontier, I think this project would have been a monster.

Simon Swain of Haines Recruitment Advertising describes the project:
From the outset, the Airforce site was going to be pretty large project. Luckily I got involved in the early stages and had input into the structure of the site, which from my perspective was critical to making the construction phase easier.

Since the ultimate aim was a flat site, not one that was going to be maintained in Frontier, It wasn't necessary to be totally pedantic about having everything done tidily via macros... Frontier just provided a great way of managing lots of components.

I still did a lot of hand coding, and because of the javascript, some pages just had to be hard coded, but without Frontier, I think this project would have been a monster.

Much of the content was going to be supplied by the Airforce, and self referential... meaning I wanted to be able to edit easily if they made changes, and needed the Glossary like nothing else.

The first real step was building a framework for the site - an outline every section, page, and their associated naviagtion, ready for the content.

Then as copy came in, it was just a matter of pasting it in the right place...

The glossary really came into it's own for creating the site map, which in itself was a last minute addition, but proved a great way to surf the site while avoiding the big images on the title pages.

A little patch I made was to change <h> tags to substitute in <font face color size> tags appropriate to the heading while rendering - a kind of primitive stylesheet... I also tweaked quite a few of the standard macros, but moved them in to #tools so I didn't change Frontier as a whole. I really wanted to make it as self contained as possible.

As the site neared completion, Adobe brought out the ImageReady demo... a few quick tests blew me away... It made such a difference to images on the site I was going to have to run them all through it... here's where I found something we really needed, Edit with App for images...