Since 1970, Stonepay has offered construction & management services. Their work has been done in 13 countries, and covers Residential homes, Commercial buildings and Expatriate housing.

A glimpse of the Stonepay's home page

As always, we strive to provide our clients with a high-end, state of the art website with the latest technologies on the market.

We created a fully customized website for Stonepay, aiming for a well-structured site, with easy-to-find and organized content. We have replaced their old flash website with a new modern website that meets the industrial standards.

(note.: Sonika Studios did not do the branding and logo design for this company)

1. We used to try to get people to stay on longer, and click on more pages until they decide to call us. It was a marketing hook. Nowdays, many people use their iPhones instead of dialing 411 or using Yellowpages. This means that it’s a good idea to have your phone number (in a standardized format so that iPhone users can click and dial) clearly visible on the very front page. Sometimes I go as far as putting the key contact info on the top of the website, close to the logo! Look at the top-right corner of the site you are on right now.
2. Putting interactive flash on the top of the front page used to be hip. It was a cool thing to have without compromising search engine placement. This could be a rotating banner, or a featured product intro – anything. Now keep in mind that an iPhone user will see a big blank with a tiny blue question mark box (that’s what the iPhone shows where Flash animation should be). Now we’ve moved on to more intelligent ways of handling it – using nifty Javascript frameworks such as jQuery and Mootools, we can create rotating banners and numbered headlines without using Flash!
3. To protect against spam, we often skipped displaying the email addresses, and used a contact form instead. But the contact forms often look tiny on the iPhone screen, and people would much rather use the regular email app on the iPhone rather than the formmail. So, now we use both. How do we prevent email addresses from being harvested for spam? We use the email address munger Javascript code which is very effective in keeping the spambots at bay.

To take things even further, you can use CSS styles that apply to specific media only. By defining “handheld” as the media type, you can choose to hide or show certain areas of the site, as well as change the colors and dimensions. For more information on using media-specific CSS stylesheets, check out the following links:

• http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/tutorials/css/mediatypes
• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/pocket/

A brief look at jQuery – it’s a javascript framework that allows you to quickly manipulate your document, while providing stylish animation effects without the need for flash. jQuery also has a daughter product called jQueryUI – a user-interface skin module that resides on top of jQuery. It also contains AJAX modules, nifty tab plugins, popup layer scripts, and more. jQuery, coupled with the jQueryUI platform, makes UI development and skinning quick and easy.

Now let’s look at Mootools – Mootools is more powerful in terms of string manipulation, array objects handling, and other deeper javascript applications. It’s AJAX functions support full XML, JSON, HTML, as well as regular text objects being returned, which makes it a more robust framework for programming upon. For more complicated and full-featured javascript applications, I would still stick with Mootools.

Which is better? I do not have an answer to that. Each framework has its own purpose, with different depths of application. When you want quick UI development with fast visual effects application, choose jQuery. If you need a more robust AJAX/JSON application, or a complicated Javascript application, go for Mootools for the heavier functions. I do find that Mootools is slightly more time consuming when it comes to visual effects applications.

Both javascript frameworks have plenty of 3rd party plugins developed (such as photo galleries and more!). Look up the plugins before you start developing, in order to choose the right framework from the beginning. Both frameworks are also compatible with all major browsers (IE6+, FF, Safari, and Opera).