Case Study 04. Cape Coral Chamber of Commerce, Dynamic Curved Navigation
Industry: Web Engineering and Local Commerce. Timeline: Approximately 2009.
The Problem.
The Cape Coral Chamber of Commerce needed a distinctive website whose navigation matched its brand, and it needed that site to connect to the Chamber’s own membership software. The obstacle was the technology of the time. The design called for a smoothly curved navigation menu, and back then the browser could not draw curves on its own. CSS could style a page but could not produce the curved shapes the design required, and there was no simple, standard way to build a menu that followed a curve and still worked as reliable, clickable navigation.
The Solution.
This was one of the first projects I took on after leaving IBM. Rather than fake the effect with a fixed picture, I built the curved menu as a real server-side system. The menu items positioned themselves along a curve defined as a vector, a Bezier path, and I generated the menu graphics on the fly in C#, so the navigation could change without anyone hand-editing images. Because those images were generated dynamically, I generated a matching image map dynamically as well, so the clickable regions followed the curve exactly and stayed correct as the menu changed. I then connected the public site to the Chamber’s own software using Microsoft ActiveX components, so the website and their internal system worked together as one.
The hardest part was not the building, it was finding the right way to build it. When I searched for how to generate the curved menu images, nearly every result repeated the same limited approach, copied from one source to the next, and it did not actually do what I needed. Rather than settle for the answer everyone else was reusing, I dug into obscure documentation and found the correct method. That instinct, to distrust the consensus answer when it does not truly solve the problem and to go find the real one, is something I have relied on ever since.
The Outcome.
The Chamber got a distinctive, dynamic website with navigation that would have been difficult to produce any other way at the time, working hand in hand with the software they already ran. More than the result itself, the project set an early marker for how I work: willing to do the harder, less obvious engineering when the easy path does not solve the problem, and able to make different technologies, a public website and internal desktop software, operate as a single system. It was among the first independent work I did after IBM, and the approach it demanded has shown up in nearly everything since.