MediaCreator.jp goes live!

A couple of days late in adding this to our blog but, we've been working on this renewal for months now and it's finally a reality!

MediaCreator.jp renewal is a complete identity, design and development renewal of Japan's largest web designer/developer tutorial community site 3E4D. We've been looking to do this for quite some time just due to the amount of work that would go into making any sitewide changes due to the over 1500 pages worth of content. This can now be done by adjusting just a few pages!

The site now runs off of asp and coldfusion, with flash remoting splattered all over the place for getting results in the tutorial search pod, download page, main poll on the home page and the administration for adding downloads, tutorials, and changing the poll.

All of the administration has now been moved to a standalone desktop application which takes advantage of Flash remoting. This in itself has made it infinitely easier to update and add to the site, which is the most important part of a community site. When content starts to get stale, people get bored, and we don't want that.

We also improved the performance greatly by reducing the amount of pages and the amount of code on the page that the web server has to serve. The site itself loads faster and getting to the tutorials and paging through them, the main part of the site, is extremely quick.

Adding in some upgrades to the forum, rebuilding the download area for direct linking, adding RSS feeds that people can use in RSS readers for keeping up with additions, improving viewing of all pieces all-round has made this renewal a major milestone with this community site.

The one are that we really wanted to improve was the tutorials which I think we have by adding a print only page for easy printing and giving the users a place to put comments and questions on the forum for each and every tutorial. I got that tip from flashcomguru which I thought was a great idea for organization. They load quicker and just in general are easier to view I think.

I've gotta say that I'm really really looking forward to see how much the community grows from this point on.

With over a hundred tutorials to port over yet we've still got a bit of work ahead of us but it's looking great even with what's in there up to this point. If you can read Japanese, or like to use translators to view it then check it out here.

Posted by Graeme at August 11, 2005 06:37 AM