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October 15, 2007
Announcing Curlew Retreat
Regular readers of my blog know it for discussions of technology, Java and Open Source.
For the past four years I have been working on Curlew Retreat. It is now a few months away from completion, so I thought it time to announce it.
Curlew Retreat - your own luxury villa on your own estate, overlooking a beautiful gorge on the Maryland River - creates a retreat of privacy, quiet and serenity, all perfectly located just to the north east of Stanthorpe. Supremely romantic, indulgent and exclusive, Curlew Retreat is the ultimate boutique 2 bedroom villa perfect for couples or families to relax, revive and re-energise. from the hustle and bustle of day to day life. Curlew, high up in the Mountain country, has a cool, crisp climate, a world away from the heat of the lowlands. With 100 beautiful acres to yourself, follow the graded track to the gorge, and, in summer, enjoy the spectacular natural rock swimming pool, or simply relax in the quiet and solitude.
For the technologists:
The site was created in iWeb from iLife '08. It turns out this tool is almost perfectly suited for creating brochure style web sites. Coming soon but not yet integrated is booking from the web site itself. This takes 3-4 weeks to set up with the supplier. So why iWeb? I hadn't used it before and I was focusing on graphic design and copy writing. For once I did not want to be distracted by technology. And the ability to work from 20 or so professionally designed themes with more from third party artisans was huge. In the end the whole site was done without input from a graphic designer.
The animation on the home page is Flash. This is the first Flash I have done. Flash is a bit of a paradigm shift from the normal Java server side stuff I do. But it's 99+% browser market share is hard to argue with. The competing approach from Apple - Quicktime, will involve a download for lots of folks, so not an option. In the future Flash's dominance for this type of thing is going to be challenged by Silverlight and JavaFX. But for now it is the way to go.
All the other magic on the site, including the image gallery, is out of the box with iWeb.
Posted by gluck at 07:02 PM
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