Hey everyone, How's it going tonight?? Please check out http://www.shanghaitang.com/. That's a really cool looking site (in my opinion). I love how they did the mouseover effect, and especially the frame surrounding the image (the corners). Any idea where I'd need to start to learn these kinds of skills? If I'm not at the right place, can you point me in the right direction? I know some basic html and I have basic understanding of CSS, but that's about it. Also the last part would be http://www.shanghaitang.com/shanghai...ollections.jsp ... click video. How do they get the video to play like that inside the frame thing? I'm sure it's all much simpler than it seems to be at the moment. Any enlightenment or help would be appreciated!

Well, first, all of this is flash, and mostly related to design.
If any mod is up to move this to the graphic sub-forum.

Then, for the corner, the way I see it it's just the way the designer made them.
It's nothing more than a framing he designed and he "cut" the pictures to fit them.

And the video, well, it's a flash video stream, and I'm far as being the one to explain you how to set this up...
Anyone ?

Personally Flash bothers me. Not very friendly for disabled people or search engines and it degrades horribly for those without Flash (or, more accurately, doesn't degrade at all, per se). This site could be done without Flash using some fairly sophisticated javascript. It might even be able to be done using CSS, but I confess to not being sophisticated enough to do it without javascript.

I agree, though, it should be moved to another forum.

Originally Posted by JeremyMiller

Personally Flash bothers me. Not very friendly for disabled people or search engines and it degrades horribly for those without Flash (or, more accurately, doesn't degrade at all, per se). This site could be done without Flash using some fairly sophisticated javascript. It might even be able to be done using CSS, but I confess to not being sophisticated enough to do it without javascript.

I agree, though, it should be moved to another forum.

I am an AJAX guy but Flash is not that bad too, and with a little of work it is possible to make it all search engine friendly. What I did to many applications, is I created pure text/html pages with lots of text about the site, created as many pages I could,. Every page has a different text of course. ALL the pages linked together with the keyworded links. Next I inserted same flash into the begginning of the body of each page, My Flash pages demensions were 100%/100% so Flash covers the whole screen,

body {
 overflow: hidden;
}

takes care of the scroller if there is too much text.
Google loves those pages :-)

The second link I pasted in my original post shows a .jsp extension - does this mean it's all done in javascript? Are there any places in particular that I should be looking in order to learn how to do this level of stuff?

no that website is 100% flash as far as I can see, click right button and u can see it.

Flash is not really about a graphic anymore its a very powerful tool that will allows people to create RIA.

I think Javascript is a more complicated compare to flash, first of all because of the different browsers. Its not easy to find a good javascript programmer especially now when AJAX is being so popular.

If you want to know AJAX, u have to start from simple Javascript, get a book first, read it u will have more idea of what is that. After start using some Opensource AJAX libraries. I used to use Prototype and Yahoo. Check this site out this guy is really knows what he is doing in AJAX.
http://www.yui-ext.com/

U played with open source stuff for a while, its good to use them but when u need something specific u have to get into them and modify, in this case its much easier to create your own API libraries. After its done u can do anything u want. Google Maps - piece of cake!

good luck.

By the way basic understanding of CSS is not really enough, so learn that too - very important.

Also to have more idea about how the page look like from inside, use FIrefox install Firefox free extention called Firebug, using that tool u can see the page insideout