Rainforest Publications produces a full line of fine field guides with beautiful scientifically accurate full color illustrations of birds, fish, butterflies, and other critters.

The nature of the product almost guaranteed that this would be a beautiful site. It also would have been easy to make it too busy and/or a bandwidth hog. When you visit the site, you'll see that we did an excellent job balancing the desire to let you see as many of the fantastic field guides in as much detail as possible, yet also create a site that you can zip around in, even if you're on dialup.

The content for the site came primarily directly from Larry, Rainforest Publication's principal. He provided copies of the products, scans of most of the field guides, photos, and did most of the writing. Our contribution to the site content was a little editing, probably more scanning than we needed to because we enjoyed the illustrations so much, a little photography, some clip-art customization, and a lot of special graphics processing.

The site encourages lingering, both by showing off the illustrations, and by offering people something to do on all the pages - from simple rollovers and images which seem to 'float' on the background, to windowed mini-pages with closer views of the products, to a 'clickable' map to help birders select the appropriate guide, and more. There are a lot of custom features and interesting details on the Rainforest Publications site, particularly involving graphics processing... might give you some ideas for your own site...

As with almost all our sites, the pages expand and contract to fit your viewing area. Try it. Click on a thumbnail to make a site come up in a new window, then 'make the window big' and watch the page spread out to fill the available area.

Not to get technical on you, but, just for a second -- except for the home page, which doesn't compress as well as the rest of the pages on the site, the range of flexibility on this site is from below 640x480 pixels to at least 1280x1024 pixels (pixels are the little dots of light on your monitor). This, and other features, make it attractive to potential customers using a wide range of equipment.

Another quality of the Rainforest Publications site worth mentioning is the fact that it uses a half dozen custom seamless tiles - these are the backgrounds that look like wallpaper on the various pages. They were created by cropping small sections from some of the owner's photos. We were lucky to get this many usable ones. It's a little different to have this much variation in the backgrounds, including both light and dark lettering, and still have a consistent design, but it works because all the page bodies have a consistent theme (the classic 'exploration' khaki & dark green color theme) which is otherwise pretty plain.