Duke University School of Medicine (DukeMed Interactive)

NoWalls did an exceptional job of stepping in at the end of the DukeMed Interactive project to provide skillful DHTML programming and ColdFusion consulting. We were truly pleased with their attention to details and timeliness in deliverables.

— Amylyn Robbins, Iona Design

When Iona Design needed extra resources to help them complete a project for the Duke University School of Medicine, they turned to NoWalls. Iona Design chose NoWalls because of our close partnership with Allaire and our experience with FuseBox web application standards.

The DukeMed site illustrates how motion and animation can enhance navigation and the user experience. Interestingly, the site is constructed without any Flash™ and uses a combination of DHTML and JavaScript to achieve its movement effects. A Day in the Life, for example, lets visitors scroll though pictures from an average student's day. Also, the movies for DukeMed On Camera were filmed specifically for streaming media.

NoWalls was brought in to code two of the more complicated aspects of the site. NoWalls developed the cross-browser DHTML used for the site's Virtual Campus, which lets prospective students tour the university without leaving home. In addition, we discovered a better way to present the site's 360-degree iPIX^® photos that doesn't require a special plug-in.

NoWalls also designed DukeMed's site-wide search feature. Because the FuseBox standards often result in a large number of files, a traditional search function would have been extremely slow. Our programmers created a "spider" that visits and catalogs the contents of the site's page objects and saves the results to an index file. The search function can then simply search the index file to find any term used on the DukeMed site.

Lastly, NoWalls trained DukeMed's staff to perform routine server maintenance and upkeep. The DukeMed project demonstrates NoWalls' ability to coordinate with several project partners and to provide focused programming and consulting at any point in a project.