For the past 3 years at least, I’ve been designing and developing websites for a variety of clients and I’ve built portfolio websites for photographers, art dealers and other designers I’ve created e-commerce websites in Flash and built PHP and Flash CMS tools for most of them to allow the website to be updated easily. I’ve created complex websites that involve a lot of planning and complicated Maths or hours and hours of tweaking animations as well as simple websites which only appear to have 1 or 2 pages and very understated animation and might take half a day to produce.
About 6 months ago I finally got a chance to play with Gaia, so I re-built my portfolio website using the framework first of all. It took about 16 attempts until I finally got the site working, but by then I had mastered the Gaia art and the following website I built took 2 days from start to finish! From that point I started using Gaia for every job I got as it made the initial site planning that much simpler and scaleable. However I then started getting frustrated. Recently I’ve built nothing but portfolio websites, these need to load super fast and get the work in front of the visitor as soon as possible in the most interesting but none obtrusive way possible. After building a couple of these sites in Gaia I decided that this isn’t the right tool for the job.
Gaia splits a website up in to pages and creates a seperate fla file for each, it then sensibly loads the various pages and handles the transitions between one page and another. This is fantastic for a website which is graphics heavy or has kick-ass animations to transition between pages but I just want to swap from one gallery to another or open a new folio and I’m having to sit through preloaders and non-existent transitions. Gaia is an awesome tool and I will be using it as much as possible in the future, but I will make sure that the project ‘needs’ Gaia to make life easier, instead of using it for the sake of it.
As a replacement for Gaia I’ve started working on my own PageManager class and Page class which let me easily control transitions between ‘pages’ but using movieclips on the stage or from the library instead of preloading and loading external swf files. For many of the portfolio websites I’ve created recently, this is all that I’ve ever needed, in fact some aren’t even that complicated.