Steven Leong’s Blog

After around 2 weeks of continuous work, sweat and quite a few extra strands of white hair; my new site is done. It’s a huge sigh of relief and a big sense of achievement, I who knew nothing.. yes, nothing of Flash programming or ActionScript actually learnt and built a site from scratch in the short period of time.

At first, I sketched up quite a few designs in Photoshop and started with a really green and natural looking design or a deep blue one which looked like my photos were floating on the sea but eventually and slowly, the current design emerged.

This was to be a slow, gentle and simple looking site; a site that encourages visitors to sit back and just take a slow look through my portfolio which as it has been always the centerpiece of my website(s) as a photographer.

Quite a lot of trade-offs were made especially of the smoothness of the ripples on the main background; the ripples could be made to feel as smooth as silk if I demanded more processing power for it but at the end, this site had to be accessible to lower-spec’ed PC and in some cases laptops too… so I had to really optimize and tweak the ripple generation to make it look at least realistic but it did end up feeling a bit sluggish due to the limits I put on the ripple generation engine.

Besides that compromise, I did have to make a couple of compromises to the original design intent as my skill as a Flash programmer is really rather limited. There were some small areas that needed some extra polish but I had no idea on how to “polish” them to the exact shape I wanted too.

Well… I hope you guys like my new site and please do feel free to post any comments on the site here. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Why are you still reading? GO THERE~!