So what’s the difference?

Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform that was developed as a way to add animation, video, audio, and other interactive elements to web pages. Viewing Flash content requires the use of a free plug-in. Developers must embed the Flash content into the HTML document, which means that the Flash content is independent of the other content on the page.

JavaScript is a lightweight, and open-source scripting/programming language designed to add interactivity to HTML pages. Unlike Flash, support for JavaScript is built right into all major web browsers without the need for additional plug-ins. JavaScript works by manipulating HTML content, which means that all content on the page is seamlessly integrated.

Why do we use JavaScript?

Firstly, JavaScript has become immensely powerful and easy to use with the development of JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, MooTools, Prototype, etc. jQuery, our library of choice, is fast, concise, and versatile. It allows us to rapidly add complex interactivity to webpages without spending a lot of time. jQuery is also an open-source project with many developers working tirelessly to improve it each day.

The Web was meant to be an open system, and to use open-source tools is to follow in that virtue. I that same vein, JavaScript/jQuery is FREE. Flash (as a tool) can be an expensive initial investment and also expensive to maintain as upgrades are released over the years.

Another problem with Flash is that the required plug-ins to support Flash content aren’t available on all platforms, namely iPhone, which means that you could be limiting your content from a huge portion of web users by using Flash. Meanwhile, jQuery works on these devices with no problem. Furthermore, even if JavaScript is disabled in a user’s browser, because JavaScript is unobtrusive in nature (integrated content), those users still have access to all of your site’s content.

Finally, JavaScript is universal. As a web project changes hands from one developer to another, no special applications are required to view or edit JavaScript files. Additionally, JavaScript is a widely known language, therefore, future modifications should be able to be made by nearly any web developer handling the project.

These are just some of the reasons we’ve chosen to use JavaScript. Hopefully next time you’re looking to add some interactive elements into your site, you’ll take a look at using JavaScript & jQuery instead of Flash.

Here is a quick tour of the main areas of the site:

Once the child creates an account, he/she will be greeted by the elf and see this home page. This is Santa's Island where the child can begin their journey!

If the child clicks on the snowman, he/she will see a naked snowman with a box that contains various articles of clothing and accessories. The child can click and drag the items over to the snowman to create one of their own. If an article of clothing doesn’t look just right, then the child can drag the item over to the trash can to remove it.

We decided to make a cowboy, bowler Snowman!

If the child goes over to Santa’s Mailroom, he/she will see a very active room with letters being sucked down a pipeline and being dropped into a pile in the center of the room. A friendly elf is quickly sorting the letters into “naughty” or “nice” pipelines that go directly to Santa’s office. If the child clicks on the colored letters on the ground, he/she can read a letter written from other children to Santa.

The Elf in Santa's Mailroom quickly sorts letters from children across the world.

Santa’s Toy Factory is my favorite part of the website. This is where children can see the worker elves in action making plenty of toys. There’s a countdown to Christmas on the wall at the top right, and the child has the option to click on a toy of their choice on the conveyor belt. If the child clicks on a toy, a window will pop-up that pulls the actual image of the product from Amazon. Then, the child has the option to add the toy to his/her “wishlist.”

Toys are quickly being assembled by elves in Santa's Toy Factory.

The final component of the site allows the child to email Santa Claus, and the child has the option to include items in the email that they selected from Santa’s Toy Factory.

So, as you can see, this was a rather involved project that required a great deal of custom illustration and then custom animation (and action script) using Adobe Flash. We were very excited to win an ADDY for this project at the 2010 awards show this year.

I invite you to visit the actual site so you can see these screenshots come to life and hear the jolly Christmas music we have playing in the background. If you have children, I encourage you to let them visit the site and have some fun next Christmas!

Do you like this site? Check out some other completed projects by our award-winning team.

With more than 60,000 entries annually, the national ADDY® Awards are the world’s largest and arguably toughest advertising competition. The ADDY® Awards represent the true spirit of creative excellence by recognizing all forms of advertising from media of all types, creative by all sizes and entrants of all levels from around the world. The American Advertising Federation conducts the ADDY® Awards through its 200 member advertising clubs and 15 districts. It is the only creative awards program administered by the advertising industry, for the industry.

This year’s local competition produced 446 entries from Baton Rouge professionals and LSU students. Judging was held January 16, 2010 at Lamar Advertising. Renee Miller, President/Creative Director of The Miller Group in Los Angles, Ca.; Jim Dudley, Broadcast, Copywriter, Creative Director of Dudley Creative in Roanoke, Va.; and Jimmy Ball, Art Director/Designer, Photographer, Interactive of Jimmy Ball Design in Dallas, Texas, served as judges for the competition.

Gatorworks brought home a Silver ADDY award for their client project, Santa’s Online Wishlist. Santa’s Online Wishlist is an interactive website where children can dress a snowman, have fun in Santa’s Toy Factory, view Santa’s Mailroom, and best of all send emails to Santa Claus. The website took approximately 6 months to hand-draw, custom illustrate, and then custom animate using Adobe Flash software. David Link, Creative Director and lead designer/developer on the project, said, “It’s really nice to be recognized for our hard work, especially in a community as talented as AAF.”

At the red carpet ceremony, 41 gold ADDY®s, 50 silver ADDY®s, three Special Judge’s Awards, a Mosaic Award, Best of Show and Best of Category awards were presented. Advertising students were also recognized with 17 gold ADDY®s, 19 silver ADDY®s, a Best of Show and Special Judges’ Awards. ADDY® 2010* also recognized professional excellence on the business side of the advertising industry with its Pinnacle Awards.

Arriving in our hotel on Sunday night was such a relief. We had just driven 26+ hours from Baton Rouge to Boston. The conference was worth it.

Monday we got to hear some excellent presenters like Jared Spool, Kristina Halvorson, Jeremy Keith, Dan Cederholm, and Jason Santa Maria among others. Tuesday we were privy to the presentations of Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Mall, Simplescott, Heather Champ, and Andy Clarke. The knowledge flowed like a river. I would love to be able to share everything I learned but I’m afraid there’s just not enough space on the internet for that. (Heh, there actually may be.)

But some really key points I picked up on from the conference are:

• Doing it just like Amazon.com does it, is not necessarily the best solution for everyone.- You have to have to traffic to sustain the type of site that amazon has, and amazon has millions of pageviews a day. Searching for something obscure on amazon typically doesn’t wield helpful results, you need a pretty good idea of what you’re looking for.
• Content is not a feature.- Content generally gets overlooked and we as web developers have been trained to accept the “put-off” of content until the final stages of the site. When, ideally, the content should all already be assembled and ready to go before the structure and architecture of the site are completed.
• Be bold, use structure, and sketch ??????? ????????? ????? ?????? ????????? 2
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  - Jason Santa Maria talked about the marginalization of design not due to inability, but due to fear and lack of process. He strongly emphasized using a grid structure, the types of grids to use, and the power of sketching.

• Sketching is not about what kind of artist you are but about the flow of information and ideas. Once you exhaust all the normal and conventional ideas you’re forced to think outside of the norm.
• We need to plan for the future. The DISTANT future.- Jeremy Keith talked about planning for the future through our CSS and using fluid layouts, jquery, and javascript. Cool URI’s don’t ever change. It was really a talk about your legacy on the web, and how the argument could be made that not only are screens getting bigger, they’re getting much more varied. So when you’re coding a site, you need to allow it to adapt to the future.
• Web Designs should ultimately lead back to user interface and usability. If something isn’t producing a good number of clicks, find out why and fix it.
• Test, Retest, and Evolve -  Simplescott creative director for the Obama Campaign’s website showed us the entire process he went through while working on Obama’s site. The key point communicated was that through testing, and evolution eventually a final was approved, and through user testing they could see that it was an easily navigable site.
• The fold is dead. – Everyone has a mousewheel now. The day when we needed to worry about what fit on the very first part of the screen is over. People will scroll down, and they will see your content.
• Make lemonade out of lemons -  Heather Champ (Community Manager at Flickr) had a great story about how when their site crashed, they ran an impromptu creativity contest with just 2 circles as the original idea. The users of the site then went to all ends of the spectrum and created some really cool effects (rather than freaking out about flickr being down). It’s a testament to ingenuity and finding ways to turn a bad situation into a good one.
• Re-engineer your workflow. Make mockups in browsers not photoshop. – Andy Clarke dropped this bomb on us as the last presenter. Making mockups in browsers is so unconventional and yet, after he really explained the process it makes  sense. It can clearly communication subtle web behaviors like hovers, javascript, and more. And if the client wants a sitewide color change, one line of css fixes that rather than changing a whole mockup.

I walked away from An Event Apart with all my premonitions and expectations annihilated. It was the most inspiring moment of my career. I would personally like to thank @brianrodriguez for sending me, because it is truly something I won’t forget.

“Our company is honored to have one of our best designers speaking at such a great event. Dave will have the opportunity to provide some insight on how our firm uses the Wordpress framework each day,” said Gatorworks President Brian Rodriguez.

David will be among some of the most influential internet gurus including Ben Huh, who runs one of the largest blog networks in the world. The event will also include a host of New Orleans-based marketing and internet gurus such as Damien LaManna of Morgan+Co, Tiffany Starnes of Fabre Smith & Coco , and Chris Schultz of Voodoo Ventures. For the complete line-up of speakers, check out the WordCampNOLA website.

Check the Gatorworks website after the event for a recap of David Link’s presentation.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them for us below. Thanks!

1. The Y@T PACK from New Orleans

Part of the Y@T PACK Bus Wrap

Net2NO, led by Damien LaManna, Tiffany Starnes, and Jessica Rohloff, is a group of young professionals dedicated to social change in New Orleans. The group puts a special emphasis on technology and economic development and they meet once a month to share ideas, collaborate on projects, and learn from special presentations by industry professionals. I joined Net2NO a few months ago and have greatly benefited from the gatherings. This group’s enthusiasm, creativity, and general concern for their community is truly contagious.

The Net2NO crew decided that we would charter a bus and go to the SXSW Interactive Conference as a group to let everyone know that not only is New Orleans open for business but also that the state is a thriving place for digital creatives and technology entrepreneurs to start or expand a business. With the help of awesome sponsors, we purchased booth space at the tradeshow armed with materials on Louisiana’s Digital Interactive Media Tax Credits for technology businesses, Angel Investment Tax Credits for start-ups, and personal success stories. We had a daily drawing at 5:04pm to give away weekend stays at the W Hotel New Orleans and a free registration to WordCamp NOLA in New Orleans, LA. (coming up April 10-11… David Link is a panelist… more info to come! )

Personally, I loved working the tradeshow booth because I saw so many people get instantly engaged in the idea of moving their businesses to New Orleans. I would mention the tax credits, the cost of living, the amazing culture, and the overall quality of life in New Orleans…and I would see people’s faces light up with excitement. I firmly believe that Net2NO will get at least one business to actually move their firm to New Orleans as a result of attending the SXSW conference.

David Link, Alise Johnson, Damien LaManna, Brian Rodriguez

Of course,  it wasn’t all work all the time. We had to throw a New Orleans party and show Austin a good time! On the night of Monday, March 16, the Y@T PACK rounded up a few hundred people at Lucky Lounge to listen to DJ Othertempo, a.k.a. Elliott Adams, who is also the Director of the Digital Interactive Office in the Louisiana Economic Development Department, and Austin Nights Brass Band. The amazing party was organized by young arts enthusiast, Andrew Larimer.

2. The SXSW Presentation / Panels

Of course, this was the meat of the conference. I had the opportunity to attend many beneficial keynote presentations and panels that discussed a variety of topics that will help further my career and ultimately provide a better product to my clients. On Saturday, I attended a presentation by Robert Hoekman, Jr. entitled “The 7 Rules of Great Web App Design.” It was a well-done presentation, and I’ll expand on his 7 rules in a future blog entry. Later that day I also attended panels that included design greats such as Jeffrey Zeldman and Jason Santa Maria.

By far my favorite presentation was by Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary has built a $60M business with his light-hearted and fun video blog “The Wine Library.” Gary had a tremendous impact on me, so I’ll have a comprehensive blog entry coming up that recaps his talk. Stay tuned!

3. The Support for New Orleans Entrepreneur Chris Schultz of Voodoo Ventures

Chris Schultz of Voodoo Ventures

Net2NO member, Chris Schultz of Voodoo Ventures, moderated a panel at SXSW called “Outsourcing 2.0: Is the World Flat or Not?” The interactive format included Q&A with other panelists, including New Orleans developer Matt Tritico, Sandeep Sood of Monsoon Multimedia in Silicon Valley and Andrea Azdril of Startech Global in Los Angeles. The room was packed with entrepreneurs, developers, and designers full of questions on the topic. Schultz did an exceptional job, and it really made me proud to see a New Orleans entrepreneur leading a discussion on a very important topic at a major tech conference. I had a tremendous sense of pride during the presentation, and I feel privileged to share both a business relationship and friendship with Chris. If you don’t know Chris yet, you need to get on it.

So, there you have it folks. I had the time of my life. I cannot wait until next year!

**Did you go to SXSW? Briefly share your exciting moments from SXSW with us below in the comments area!**

(Baton Rouge, La) Gatorworks’ Brian Rodriguez, David Link, and Alise Johnson were selected to speak at the 2009 American Advertising Federation of Baton Rouge Student Conference to be held on Saturday, March 28. The conference will discover how the area’s finest copywriters, designers, media buyers, and photographers keep their profession from becoming #2.

The Gatorworks team will discuss “Making the Transition from Print to Web” during one of the breakout sessions at the conference. “We find that many graphic designers coming out of college have a strong background in print design; however, they have a hard time making the transition into web designers,” says firm president Brian Rodriguez. Brian and his team hope to share tips and tricks that will assist the print graphic designer in becoming a successful designer for the web.

Be sure to check the Gatorworks blog at www.gatorworks.net after the conference for a recap of their presentation. To find out more details, contact Brian Rodriguez at (225) 709-6153.

Hello and welcome to a first in a series of interviews we’re going be releasing at the speed of two a month, to you, our very valued readers. Our first interview is with a very special person out in Louisiana, David Link. As I was going through twitter before the re-launch I realised I followed a great person and totally forgot that I had him on AIM, With a snap I was IMing him and David was more than happy to help out. So without further a do, here is the interview, Hope you enjoy it and please leave a comment, we’ll get back to David with any questions you post in a few weeks.

First of all, Could you lead us through a brief history of you’re life? Where you live, what you do?

Sure. I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1984 (That makes me 24 years old). I’ve lived in Louisiana my whole life. I graduated from Louisiana State University in May 2007 with a BFA in Graphic Design. It was then I began working for Gatorworks Web Design in Baton Rouge. I started out there as a strictly designer. But since then, my responsibilities have grown to include not only design, but all aspects of front-end development as well.

How did you get started out on the web and what inspired you to get into coding?

When I was a kid (around 11 or 12), web design was really young. In fact, from what I understand, the first website was published only a few years before then. But I had always been really interested in art (thus my decision to study design). And around that age, I began to take an increasingly larger interest in computers as well. My interest in computers led to my inevitable obsession with the Internet. So, one day my dad bought me an HTML book to learn how to make my own webpages. And the rest is history.

What languages do you code and which one do you think is more 1. powerful, 2. simple and 3. you enjoy more?

I code in (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript (jQuery), ActionScript, and I’m just beginning to get going with some more PHP.

Which one is most powerful? Hmm… that’s a difficult question. Obviously PHP is super-powerful, but to me, CSS gives you the biggest bang for your buck. Just a few small changes in CSS can completely reface an entire website.

Simple? jQuery. “Write less, do more” is their motto and this amazing little JavaScript library definitely lives up to its promise.

My favorite? Currently, it’s PHP. I started learning about PHP so I could develop themes for WordPress. And now that I’m learning more and more, I’m really starting to have some fun with it.

What sites you use for inspiration and do you recommend any to our readers?

For design inspiration, some of my mainstays are Design Meltdown, Fuel Your Creativity and Abduzeedo. For dev tips/tricks, I always turn to CSS-Tricks, Sharebrain, Smashing Magazine and NETTUTS.

Do you have any other hobbies? if so what are they and why do you enjoy them?

Of course I do! No one can live their whole life buried in code! When it’s time to unwind, I like to shoot a few dudes on Xbox Live, watch movies, play guitar, and I really love to cook.

Do you run a PC, or a Mac, why?

I’m a Mac. I switched about 6 years ago and haven’t looked back. I love the smoothness of the interface and the overall aesthetic of the applications. Since I bought my first Mac, I’ve always felt more productive. And that reason alone is enough to keep me on one. Oh! And the apps…

What software couldn’t you live without and could you name 3 reasons?

TextMate (from Macromates) is running on my computer at all times. The absolute best text editor I have ever used, and its user community continue to make it even better all the time.  TextMate’s numerous bundles, intuitive tab-triggers, and ever-growing usefulness make it my number one most indispensable tool. Of course, I also need to mention Transmit (from Panic) because it’s certainly the greatest FTP client I’ve ever come across and I couldn’t live with out it, either.

When you first started out, how did you promote yourself? If at all?

I actually just recently started promoting myself. Although I can certainly now see the importance of self-promotion, it was something I never seemed to make time to focus on before now. I definitely wish I would’ve started when I was younger. You really gotta put yourself out there if you ever want people to notice you.

What was the first coding job you ever got?

Some of the first coding jobs I ever got were tiny ActionScript projects I picked up in college. I found a great client through a site called Rent-A-Coder, and that was really where I first starting making actual money for doing the stuff I had been doing for fun all that time. Lucky for me, I still get paid for having fun.

Finally, Where can we find you on the web, Be that your twitter, portfolio or other?

My personal blog is located at http://upsidestudio.com and you can follow me on Twitter via @davidlink. Thanks!

This is reprinted from Amazing Coder on February 10, 2009.

Our goal is to raise $4,000 to help drill a well in an Ethiopian village. In an area where people make less than $1 a day, these expensive improvements are hard to come by without our help.

If you have suggestions for venue, entertainment, or any thing else, PLEASE leave a comment or contact myself or David Link. I will update this blog with more information as it comes along. If you are interested in attending/helping out … please let me know. We can’t do this without you.

Stay Tuned!