Gaia Framework

At the death of 2010 I finished a neat little flash site for a event A/V company, All Safe and Sound.  Working for a client via a Design Agency (Braden Threadgold) I was tasked to create a simple but engaging brochure site.

I decided to give the Gaia framework a spin.  The client didn’t forsee a huge amount of content addition during the site shelf life, so using a full CMS seemed a bit over kill.

I’d seem numerous sites produced with Gaia and seemed to tick most of my boxes:

The Pros;   Gaia : Takes care of :

• Navigation
• Transitions
• Preloading
• Asset Management
• Dynamic Font Loading

Another major plus is Gaia supports DeepLinking, a must in this day and age.

Gaia allows you to jump in and out off the Gaia world, you can allow gaia to load a control all of you page assetts, or if you wish, or have already pre built classes and modules seamllessly transfer the user experience over to them.

Gaia allows SEO scaffolding a click of a button, this is an elegant solution of using a single XHTML file which serves as both the data source and the embed page for each page in your site.  This suited me as I wanted the content that appeared in the flash to also be delivered to non flash / mobile users.

My experience

Gaia is well documented, with a well established, friendly forum that was invaluable for those first run through niggles.  While I agree with the premise set out on the home page ‘work the way you like’, I did find that my brain had to migrate slightly to ‘Gaia Mode’, but not unduely so and no more than I expected, to get the best out of the frame work