Creative Web Development

The Pettengill House, Inc. is an award-winning non-profit social service agency for the local community on the North Shore, MA. They do fantastic work helping families and the community but their website was in desperate need of a facelift and re-organization. That’s where Holly Gagne stepped in. She contacted myself and together we worked with the team at the Pettengill House to create a new site that conveyed their brand and allowed users to find content and resources easily.

Some site features that we implemented included a custom Facebook feed on their homepage. Believe it or not Facebook does not offer an easy way to get their feed (without their branding and what not) on your website. Tapping into it was a challenge but their homepage will be updated easily every time a Facebook post is made. In addition, we created a page for a Google Calender of their events, an image gallery of past events, and two web forms for easy submissions. We also connect their paypal account to the donation page to make it easy for users to show their support and donate to this great cause.

EBSCO Discovery Service’s website needed a major facelift and re-organization. We began to work on the project and spent a lot of time to really nail down a site map that could organize the vast amount of information that needed to be conveyed while at the same time have room to grow as the service grows. From there the design team created a new, clean design that allowed the content to shine. The major functionality of the site is the ability to showcase screen-shots within a light-box and to at the same time link directly to that light-box if necessary.

While the site is launched we are continuing to work on it and improve the content and functionality. Stay tuned for updates.

Boston Furniture Design is a family owned and operated business, specializing in custom upholstery for commercial and residential spaces. They approached me to help them design and develop a web presence to help them increase their visibility and attain traction in the marketplace. It was a pleasure working with them and between their great work and attention to detail we were able to whip up an amazing website.

Simplicity was key here. We wanted to showcase their work and give the consumer the information they needed to get started without any interruptions. We used straight HMTL and hand coded CSS to achieve this. I created a simple jQuery image gallery for the commercial and residential sections to showcase some of their work.The site gives them a great starting off point and leaves room for expansion as their business grows.

EBSCO’s old careers site was lacking in a few different ways. It had a poor user experience, bad navigation and a apparent lack of SEO. We set out to change all that. We streamlined the site-map and site architecture to make it easier for a prospective candidate to find the information they needed to apply for jobs. We also skewed very heavy on the SEO for this site which means there is a lot of text on the pages to reinforce keywords that people search for jobs on. Other features that I added included a more flexible news section. This section now functions a lot like a blog and allows for the addition and sorting of each category like – videos, events, career fairs and other relevant job-seeking tips.

After a lot of hard work the new eBooks site for EBSCOhost has launched. About 8 months ago we began work on this new marketing site. This new initiative for the company had to make a bold statement and be rich in content and functionality. We wanted to showcase the breathe of the product we offer as well as what will differentiate us from competitors. The challenge we faced from a marketing perspective is that we are actually launching the marketing prior to the full development of the product so there were many shifts and tweaks along the way to account for product development.

That’s all well and good but what about the site you ask? Yes! The result is a portal type site – allowing consumers to choose between eBooks or Audiobooks – that is very rich in content and our offerings. Taking advantage of Expression Engine we were able to build out multiple channels to support all the content we wanted to incorporate. I utilized java-script to showcase our featured titles and metadata in sleek carousel with hover. The subject sets were built so that the users can quickly find pricing and titles in a given category. The Audiobooks section gives users samples to listen to. The site is built in HTML 5 so that as it grows and browsers start to incorporate more of the mark up in their updates the site can utilize all the new language’s features. Take a look and see for yourself!

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.

With a conference looming, the marketing team was challenged to build a full scale website promoting our OPAC product in about a week. The team here was up for the challenge and we set to work. Through careful planning and organization we were able to pull it out. I worked closely with design and with the copywriter to make the site architecture flow smoothly and to create a standardized template that could work for all the content.

In the end we made the deadline and the site was promoted throughout the conference. The site’s dynamic navigation was easy to implement using Expression Engine. To showcase the product we used screen grabs that are enlarged through a javascript lightbox functionality.

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!

The Sears Auto Team at A&G is excited to announce that after many months of preparing Sears Auto has now entered the social media space with, Exploring My America – Road Stories. The first phase of this campaign is a recruitment website that explains the project and allows people to apply for one of the 21 designated road trips around the country. That is where I came in. Working with the designers and team at A&G I developed and brought this registration site to life based on the comps.

The site is coded in HTML and PHP. I used Jquery for the homepage effects with the maps, the faq page, as well as for client side validation on the apply form. For the apply form – originally users were to upload their videos – for which we were using uploadify to do so. However, we decided to go with just a Youtube link instead. The form is validated via jquery and php. It writes to a database and I created a simple admin site for the brand promotions team who will be choosing the participants. All in all Sears is thrilled and excited to get started on this summer roadtrip!

*Site is no longer live as program has ended.