Aloha Outdoor
Link

The first commercial website which I designed, Aloha Outdoor aims to introduce an online catalog to its customers, allowing potential buyers to check the products online before driving out and buying them.

The challenge with Aloha Outdoor was to make the website attractive and not boring, yet nothing on the flashy, vibrant side. This was done by using a small amount of Macromedia Flash animation on the top navigation bar as well as on the underliner. White rectangles with different transparency levels are moved in sync with each other, creating a smooth, energetic effect, yet not so such that the animation would steal attention from the main content of the website.

Aloha Outdoor is a retail store, meaning they buy in products from companies and sell them to customers. Because of this, the number of products which they sell come from a wide variety of companies, causing another difficulty when designing the catalog. If not careful, the webpage has the potential to turn messy, making it difficult for customers to search for their desired product.

To solve this problem, I turned to one of the simplest form of organizing data. Under list forms, each company which Aloha Outdoor deals with has its own column and page, allowing viewers to browse the catalog under companies, and further down, production lines.

For easy navigation, the all graphic links uses a mouse-over technique, allowing the colour within the image to change, letting the user know where they are clicking.

Aloha Outdoor Website