Site Information - Ka'anapali Dreamin'
August 2007
Technologies
Mostly static HTML pages with a few PHP pages. Some data elements stored in MySQL database.
CSS-based layouts with no tables.
Flickr API integration in Photo Gallery and on various sidebars.
Blogger API integration to show related blog post details and comments on some pages.
YouTube videos in the Video Gallery.
Google Maps used for restaurant and activity locations, as well as satellite imagery for beaches.
AJAX for loading data feeds and incorporated in a few interactive games and pages.
About Ka'anapali Dreamin'
Ever since our first trip to Hawaii in May 2004, we new there was something magical about the islands. When we arrived in Maui two years layer, our lives changed for ever.
Ka'anapali Dreamin' is a site intended to share all the magic of Maui with anyone that's ever visited Maui, lives in Maui, or is thinking of going to Maui. It showcases daily content such as news, weather and photos, activity ideas such as tours and restaurants, reviews of books and music, and details of our own trips to the Valley Isle.
How It Started
Aside from being a class project, this site was something a little new for me and pushed my limits a little farther. Up to this point, all my websites have been built as web applications from the eyes of a programmer, not a traditional web designer. Even simple pages like the one your reading now was at some point stored in a database and assembled via a server scripting language. Focusing too much on getting code to work and technical design, my site design skills took a back seat.
So Ka'anapali Dreamin' was a chance to begin anew and follow a formal web design process without thinking in code and databases. It matured from various Photoshop layouts and comps, sliced and diced into images and templates, and brought to you mainly with static HTML and client side scripting. It's allowed me to grow more as a web designer than a web application developer.
As far as the site itself, earlier in the year I had added a section to the Kris & Cindy site to feature Hawaii and why we love the islands. Not very long after, and while planning our second trip to Maui, did I realize that our love for Maui was growing stronger and stronger and our experiences and memories were getting to the point where we could just fill an entire site just on Maui.
And that's what happened.
History
The first full release of this site was published at the end of September 2007. With over 60 pages to start with, it was a good 2 monhs of development and testing to get it up and running, and we're pretty happy with it. There are still a few features and details that I'm adding, as well as a few issues that need to be resolved, but for a first release of a site this size, it stands up well.
Features
This site is currently broken down into five main sections and is also pulling content and data from multile sources. Here are a few of the highlights.
The Daily Maui section is designed to feature new content on a daily basis. It features news from sources like Google and other local newspapers in Hawaii, weather information from NOAA at weather.gov, and daily photos from our collection at Flickr.
The Activities section is the larger section of the site, that showcases everything from tours and sights to restaurants and shopping on the island of Maui. It also have a Regions area that zooms in on Google Maps of the different locations on Maui and helps to visuaize where everything is.
The Reviews section features our own take on books and music with a Maui focus, as well as details on things like magazines that we subscribe to. For the product-based reviews, there are product details and links from Amazon to help visitors get even more info.
Our Trips shares details and memories of our own trips to Maui (two so far, at least two more planned) to offer up more insight into our love affair with everything related to Maui. We've posted itineraries, journal entires, photos and even videos from our trips in this section.
Created with Blogger, this site is the first of mine to include a blog, adding to the interactiveness and freshness to the site. At the time the blog as created, we were just about to leave on a trip to Maui, so it was perfect timing to use this as an online diary of our daily activities while visiting the place we love. When we're not in Maui, the blog becomes a place to talk story with everyone out there about the latest events and topics related to Maui and Hawaii in general.
What's Next
Other than a few finishing touches here and there, I still have a lot of content to upload. There are a number of books and music that I want to add to the Reviews section, as well as photos and video from our last trip that still need to be processed and uploaded.
From a functional level, one of the goals of this site was to be very interactive and not just a stop on the web where people visit and move on. I plan to think of what the best way would be to add "blog like" features to different sections and pages of the site where visitors can post and read comments for anything on the site, not just the blog. That's sort of a tall order, but I think it would help take this site to the next level.