SpikeL

a major accomplishment for tulyfoto, well in my eyes at least...tulyfoto.com has been a horizontal scrolling website since its official relaunch. when i was developing it, i had a talk with mark jardine of tapbots and he mentioned how horizontal scrolling websites aren't used much because it isn't user friendly. since then i knew i had to implement a way to make it easier to navigate through the pictures.

i used a jquery script that chris coyier from css-tricks recommended but the thing is it wouldn't work in firefox for me but it did work in the example chris coyier had. the following was true as well, the example chris had didn't work for safari and chrome but it worked for me. based on our site's analytic this was a problem because about half of the visitors to our site were on firefox. this wasn't much of a problem for mobile safari on the iphone since it works so well with the iphone's touch controls but on a laptop or desktop it was.

one day i came across the site, the horizontal way. a nice website that showcases horizontal scrolling sites. they even had a template with a custom javascript that seemed to bind the window scroll to the mouse wheel successfully in IE and firefox. not to mention a few other capabilities which were nice. so i decided to rework the tulyfoto website to take advantage of this.

i'm in the process of picking up some php and mysql so i decided to let tulyfoto be my official guinea pig in delving into the language. i must say the way the code can be organized is quite pleasing and being able to use the good ol' switch statement to execute certain javascript codes that handles the menu on the website was nice.

the code is a lot cleaner in the back end and it should be easier to roll out new features in the future. i'm hoping to create a custom cms so my not-so-techie partner can also maintain the website.

one of the bumps i ran into while making the changes was that the horizontal way's script didn't work for safari and chrome. so i thought i'd just try the script the script chris coyier had recommended and voila! across all browsers now we have horizontal scrolling via mouse wheel. i'm not sure why the individual scripts wouldn't work for certain browsers but together they seem to work interestingly well.

i also got rid of the lazy-load script. it was a script that would determine the visitor's current view and load elements based on that. so that the website wouldn't load all at once and "speed" up the loading process. while it was a cool script it would make the scroll bar shrink extremely fast which caused an unwanted viewing experience.

all i have left now is retheming our wordpress install so that it takes advantage of this. i think i need to also work out some kinks in the layout for the blog. it's not the most efficient but for now i'm happy with how far the site has come.

feel free to mozy on by to tulyfoto.com and test out the scrolling. let me know if it works or doesn't work for your browser. to my knowledge it should work for firefox, safari, chrome and IE7 and up. the only major browser i haven't tested it on was opera.