I’ve finished revamping the Celestino Couture website. This will be the second revision. I had originally redone their website using Flash Pro. This was a great learning exercise, but I wanted something that fit my programmer experience better.
So when Rusty contacted me about updating the website with their new press articles and collection, I decided to take things to the next level and convert the Flash site to Flex.
This turned out to be much easier than I thought. Adobe’s Flex Builder is built on top of Eclipse. I’m a long time Eclipse user, and use Zend Studio (also built on top of Eclipse) for most of my web development. Since I am already familiar with both ActionScript and Eclipse, it was just a matter of learning Flex and MXML.
I’m really delighted with the results. Appearance-wise not much has changed, but under the covers this is a very maintainable website. All code has been tracked from the beginning with Subversion, and the code is easily organized into components.
Now I’m integrating FlexMonkey testing which will bring this website up to my normal, professional standards.
Rusty has been very patient with me in doing all of this, but I expect that the next updates will happen in the order of hours instead of weeks.
The site should be online this week, after I get the go-ahead from Rusty and Sergio. Until then the release candidate website can be viewed on my test site. Once it is online at the official Celestino website I will remove it from the test site.