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Portfolio update: Concertgebouw and KLM

Quite unexpectedly I was able to add a site to my portfolio that had been shelved for nearly two years: the new website of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. In addition I'd like to draw attention to the new KLM site, in which I had a modest involvement and which contains an interesting CSS/JavaScript feature that I haven't yet seen anywhere else.

Concertgebouw

Portfolio page.

In December 2003 I was contacted by website company SQR to code the front end of the new Concertgebouw site. The Concertgebouw is the prime host for classical music concerts in Amsterdam, home of the Concertgebouworkest, one of the best classical orchestras in the world, and is generally famed for its excellent acoustics. In contrast, its previous site was not very good.

The project went well; I created HTML/CSS templates with just a touch of JavaScript and everybody was happy. Unfortunately it turned out that the ticket reservation system didn't work too well, it crashed whenever anyone tried to order a ticket, something that rather detracted from the new site's user experience. For this reason among others, the site was shelved for nearly two years, and it has gone online only in the past few days.

I did not create the current ticket ordering pages; and I feel they could do with a bit of touching up.

In any case the Concertgebouw project was the start of a fruitful cooperation between SQR and me, which resulted in, among others, the DELA forms, DELA Uitvaartkompas and the RPPC site.

KLM

In August 2005 I got an emergency call from website company Lost Boys who had created the new KLM Royal Dutch Airlines website, but encountered a few tricky JavaScript problems that it didn't have the manpower to solve quickly. I was able to remove a few bugs from the XMLHTTP scripts, and as a result wrote my addEvent() considered harmful and XMLHTTP notes: responseXML and IE bug entries.

The reason I want to draw attention to the site doesn't have anything to do with Ajax, though. Please go to the new homepage, and be sure to watch it both with a large resolution like 1024x768 and a smaller one like 800x600. As you see, the content elements are ordered slightly differently in the different resolutions.

I rather like the effect, and I'm going to keep it in mind for future projects. The KLM site uses JavaScript for the effect, but I'm wondering if it could be done in pure CSS. Probably, though I don't immediately see how. (And to be completely clear: I didn't have anything to do with this idea; it was already there when I started working on the site)

No portfolio page for this site, since I did rather less than 1% of the work.

Update: The KLM site seems to contain a misfiring browser detect that affects Firefox; please don't comment on this because I can't help it.

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