The last two months I have been pretty busy with a project, constructing a website for the daily English newspaper, New Age [The first was making the 1di site and should be credited in serving as a portfolio to get me this work]. The focus of the project has been on Bangladesh Elections.
The project has been advertised in not only via New Age’s newspaper, but also in the websites of Prothom Alo, BD Jobs, AND facebook. If you haven’t came across it, you can see it live here.
The entire site was made with Wordpress, but for the interactive map, as well as some other stuff, I used various open source softwares and JavaScript libraries. It has been a learning experience as well, allowing me to learn cURL, SimpleXML, etc. etc. I won’t bore you with the details. From a users perspective, the selling point of this "product" has been the maps. So I took at as a challenge to do the entire thing in JavaScript and not flash, so anyone without a Flash plug-in can use it. Overall, i think it wasn’t a bad choice. (a note aside, i *can’t* do flash, yet).
The best part about the entire project was scaring The Daily Star to publish their redesigned website. More people read Daily Star over New Age, and the fact is, they made their redesign live the day after New Age started advertising my site (most links in their so-called new site are still not working). Two days later, they published their own, sucky, interactive map. Even a computer illiterate can tell it was done in a hurry, with both their new site not working properly and their map having fundamental mistakes. Actually, I found the map they used was *cough*borrowed*cough* from Wikipedia!.
Another good thing about this one was working with another development team, Somewhere In... Let me tell you, they have a KILLER office, including a table tennis board in the conference room! It was that awesome.
It’s been a good year.
