Our goal was to create a simple, quick loading site with information about the movies that we show at The Ridge Theatre. While our first love is film, we are also crazy about effective distribution of information. Our site has evolved from a very simple text based site to a more appealing site designed by our partners, SKMB Communication by Design. We re-use the graphic elements on almost every page of the site; therefore we feel that we are not being excessive with the design.
We also wanted a site that could grow with our clientele and offer a forum for the views of our visitors. To accomodate this, Mark Wilkinson of Sitegeist came up with a reviews routine written in Visual Basic 4.0.
He writes about the five star rating system:
The rationale was to generate dynamic graphics without actually having
to manipulate any graphical data in the CGI code. So I started with a
pre-constructed set of image files which are used as templates. The
relevant template-image is copied during execution of the CGI to a known
filename called by the .html file. Thus this image, though "hard coded"
in the HTML page, is actually dynamic since the underlying image data in
that file is being updated/over-written as needed by the CGI program.
Poor mans image manipulation! In this instance, the database is
re-scanned after a rating submission to calculate the new average score,
and the template image reflecting this score is copied over the previous
"rating" image.
The name of the graphic is assigned a unique name based on the first 12 characters of the movie name; this name is added to every page through the rendering capabilities of Frontier. Additionally, the unique name is used to identify any reviews for every movie in our repertoire.