Traversal - Web Design / Development

The talented team at Catalyst Group in New York recently completed a re-design of the web site for Christies, the famous international art business. I was privileged to produce the XHTML templates and JavaScript behaviours to realise the ambitious information architecture and beautiful visual design Catalyst created for this project.

Amongst many examples of a richer user interface experience, the new Christies web site offers customers an AJAX-driven lot finder with custom widgets to quickly drill down into specific search criteria for Christies auctions. Customers can then view the results of the search in a list view to focus on the detailed information about the works, or a grid view to better compare the works visually.

I used the Prototype and Scriptaculous JavaScript libraries to create engaging UI widgets and libraries to support this functionality. Using these libraries also ensured that the JavaScript behaviours performed equally well across all browsers and platforms, and that everything was easily reusable for the in-house application development team to build the final site.

The richness of the interface also required advanced XHTML and CSS layout code to ensure a consistent experience across the major web browsers in the market, which certainly called upon all of my past experience and knowledge of browser quirks and workarounds to complete the final set of templates.