Creative Web Development

This was my first new site build in Expression Engine. While, now looking back I might have built it a little differently – overall all parties are happy with the site and it is easily update-able. The site was created to promote all the corporate database products that we offer.

To give the site some pizazz I built the homepage slide-show as well as the learning center slide-shows using jquery’s cycle plug-in. Other features include jquery tabbed navigation in the learning centers section and lightbox to display sample snippets from the reports. The site provides some great insights to these products offered and provides consumers with actual free samples of the product, increasing awareness and getting the consumer involved with our offerings.

Its been a while since I have posted, but lots of new and exciting development has still been happening! I moved permanent positions and am now working as a developer for EBSCO Publishing and its been great. EBSCO’s marketing department moved their entire network of marketing sites onto Expression Engine. I was super excited to dive in and learn this new CMS. As some of my first tasks I converted two of their existing sites onto this new platform. Both Discovery (right) and the Point of Care (below) websites I rebuilt using the expression engine back-end but keeping the existing site design and content. It was awesome to get right in there and learn EE through building these sites.

I did get to flex a few development muscles however as I added some new JavaScript technologies to both of these sites. I updated the left navigation to include a jquery – accordion like functionality. I also added light-box for any screen-shots, and updated the form validation with jquery validate.

Look out as we will be launching a new microsite soon after the new year where I really got to play with EE’s functionality! Also, coming soon HTML 5!! I have been doing a lot of research on the new release and am psyched to start taking advantage of the new mark up.

Bridges Montessori School, a Bright Horizons School, set out to update their website with a new design and new functionality all built in an easy to maintain CMS. Sitefinity was chosen for this purpose. The design was given to a&g and I set out to bring the unique features they required to life. The most challenging part of building the site was getting the layout in the templates just right. Because the content is managed through the CMS the layout had to always be able to expand to all difference heights depending on the content – so the footer had to have a special function in order to always know it needs to sit below the body content.

Other unique features of this site that I used is the drop down navigation, the homepage slide-show (which is done in jquery), three different contact forms- including the one short one that is on every page. All of the forms are saved to the database and email out the information In addition, audio was needed for the school song. I used a unique jquery audio player for this. A few other items worth mentioning are the use of jquery for “Read More” information on some of the long pages as well as the use of Google maps and Google calendar for very easy maintenance of these important items!

So after much labor here it is – a revampted homepage for Filzfelt in the ecommerce solution of Shopify. Filzfelt wanted a fresh look for their homepage and wanted to incorate newsfeeds that pulled from different areas of their site to keep the content fresh and relevant. Working with Pinkergreen they decided on an updated design and I set to work – diving into Shopify. Being new to this CMS, I spent some time learning about the custom code it uses. Shopfiy is actually a really great ecommerce solution for small businesses. They provide an easy dashboard for customers to manage their inventory as well as make quick site updates. Like wordpress, you can build custom themes or use existing themes for your store.

Learning the shopify language of “liquid” was quite a challenge at first but after some initial speed bumps it made complete sense and building out the new html, javascript and liquid in the page templates came together. Their are three newsfeeds on the right side of the homepage. One pulls from the blogs, one from their latest news and the last displays a featured product. The Featured Product feed was tricky as it required some Javascript to randomize what image is shown. In addition to the feeds I added social icons with rollover effects to the footer. Take a look and check out Shopify as an e-commerce solution if you do not know about it!

SophiaD is a new company formed by a friend of mine selling beautiful, fashionable raincoats for little girls. The challenge with this site was it needed to built in such a fashion that didn’t comprise the design provided to me, but was completely update-able by the site owner who knows no HTML or code. The solution was to use Word Press in a completely un-blog site!

The results have been awesome. Each page is completely up-datable, including the homepage slideshow. Utilizing Jquery I was able to create the nice effect on the collection pages with the different views of the pieces. Lastly, using a handy plug in I was able to give the site an easy email sign up form that can be managed through the Word Press Admin panel.

One of my clients at A&G, Bright Horizons, has a school in San Fransisco that just opened its doors this past fall. The headmaster wanted a site that himself and his staff could go in and make daily updates – to keep parents informed of the school work and events. We created this site for them in the Content Management System (CMS) of Sitefinity which worked out beautifully.

Sitefinity is a CMS tool that is built in ASP.net. Connecting to a SQL database Sitefinity stores all its information in tables in the database. I utilitzed Sitefinity’s built in capabilities to create the pages and dropdown menu. However, I created my own Mater Templates (for the layout) as well as my own templates for the contact form.

The school’s staff can now login through a web based interface and make easy updates through a word-like editor without affecting any of the code. They can also add new photos and pages!

Ocean’s Alliance is a local non-profit research organization that focuses on whales and marine toxicology. Their old site was done more than 10 years ago and was ready for an over-haul. As part of my final project myself and my practicum team created this new site for them.

OA (Ocean’s Alliance) had a lot of content – I am talking over 200 pages of content. We took their old site, cleaned and re-organized their content to create a new sitemap that was more streamlined and would make sense to the end user. OA also wanted to be able to edit their site and make updates. Using Dreamweaver templates we built their site so that they could use Adobe Contribute to make their updates. Additionally, some key functionality we created for them is the frontpage slideshow, the AJAX email signup (on the homepage) and some interactive interior pages including the gallery pages where we used a shadow box to really highlight their beautiful imagery. Its a great cause and we were so happy to deliver them their final product!

*Please note they have since updated their website. The link brings you to their new website which looks like it is done in wordpress.