For those looking to view the photo gallery from last year’s Hamburg Music Fest, it’s located here.
T-shirt customization website designed
I stepped into Mr. Mugs & Awards in Hamburg, NY a few months ago and handed one gentleman our brochure, and was immediately presented with questions about designing a website capable of customizing text on a shirt imprint, and then handling the custom shirt as an e-commerce object for purchase with PayPal or something similar. “Can you do this?” he asked. “Absolutely,” I replied.
So we formulated proposals and diagrams to illustrate our ideas for his site. He seemed to like all of our ideas, and within a couple weeks, we were creating mockups for strictlyt.com. He said he wanted a ‘distressed’ look, and it certainly is.
We created a custom Flash/ActionScript3 application for the users to generate the custom products which can be added to cart in whatever color, quantity or size they desire.
The custom content management system is pretty elaborate too, with two more custom Flash/AS3 apps for the administrator to calibrate the designs and add/remove colors from the palette. From the CMS they can also view receipts from PayPal, with the exact images that the user generated when they paid for their shirts.
Unfortunately, this site has not been a very high priority for the owners, so the content is still not ready for use (many designs were only half-way created and there are many useless pages). If you want to check out the site, bear in mind that it is not officially published yet.
The website is strictlyt.com. The designs that work are
- Tire service
- Irish pub
- Race team
- Nice imprint (one of many random names)
Simple stock photography website coming soon
A local Hamburg, NY villager stepped into our studio a short while back, and inquired about establishing a website for the sale of his photography. He mentioned how it would need to prevent a user from simply downloading the full-sized image through any back-doors or loopholes before paying online for the license to use the photo. He was immediately impressed with our proposal, and had us purchase the domain name that same night.
Due to his circumstances, he didn’t have the means to go with the entire proposal, but rather a simplified version of the website until he was able to afford the necessary programming and design work.
The current (intermediate) version can be seen at agriculturalimaging.com.
A website with advanced AJAX navigation designed
I’ve recently had the pleasure of converting someone’s PDF mockups to a fully functioning website. This job came from freelancer.com, and happens to be my first bid on that site that was (honestly) accepted.
The employer (Niklas Olsson) wanted to remake his personal website: niklaso.com into something completely custom, impressively smooth and easy to navigate. He was displeased with the speed of his current site as well, so he wanted to stay away from using a somewhat cumbersome framework like WordPress, preferring a design specifically written for his website, with of course, a custom content management system.
Niklas wanted his website to emulate the functionality of foundersfund.com (basically), with a few other custom requests. So far, I believe I’ve met all of his goals as well as some of my goals for the site. He provided the mockups, the images and a written description of the functionality, and needed me to design, roughly according to his specification, the PHP structure, the MySQL database schema, the CSS styling, and the jQuery/JavaScript effects for loading page content asynchronously using AJAX.
He’s impressed with how it’s coming along, and is in the process of hiring me for another simpler job. Actually, he requested that I do this next job before finishing his personal site.
If you’d like to see what I’ve created for the new niklaso.com, check out njeo.idwds.com.
Timeclock web app created from scratch in one evening
Tom was keeping track of the hours he spent on a particular project in a notebook for a while, which seemed adequate, but not ideal. “Tom,” I said, “how about we create a web page that acts as a time clock: we can have a MySQL database of employees (ourselves), customers, projects, and sessions with simple start/stop buttons to begin an end sessions, which would automatically calculate the number of hours and minutes spent on each session, adding to the time spent on the project, and adding to the time spent for that customer to whom the project belongs.”
It was a spontaneous thought, and within 4-5 hours, we had a universal time clock application that we could use from anywhere in the world–even from our smart phones–to record the time we spend on our projects, with a “comment” field next to every session to describe what happened during that session.
.htaccess redirects may conflict with WordPress’s URL structure
Since we updated our site, the location of some pages has moved to a different URL address. Search engines have already indexed these pages to be in the old location, and if it turns up as 404 (missing), my SEO rank will be harmed as they try to find the new URL. The ordinary way to fix this is to use cPanel’s redirects (user interface for Apache’s “.htaccess”). This method sends a 301 (moved permanently) header to the browser or search engine, along with the new address. Apparently that doesn’t leave you completely unharmed in the rankings, but it’s much better than a 404.
My problem with that was that it didn’t work……nope, it did nothing at all. Thankfully, my suspicion was correct: WordPress uses Apache’s “mod_rewrite” to change the URL supplied by the browser to “index.php” on the fly in .htaccess, so all I needed to do was reorder the code to have WordPress’s script come last.
Flag graphic designed
I received an email from American DND of Grand Island, NY, about a need for a custom graphic for the side of trailers. “A waving American flag that blends into a checkered flag” was the description given, and 3 days was the deadline. “Certainly” was our reply, and we had it done the next day.
The graphic was produced with Adobe Illustrator, and is a vector, so it can be enlarged to the size of a billboard without appearing blurry or grainy.
Highland Acres Landscaping website
Todd and Wendy of Eden, NY found us when driving by our office in Hamburg, also back in September. HighlandAcresLandscape.com is their new site.
The keyword for their site is, “simple”. Simple is ok, I suppose, although it’s not what we would have liked to have done with it. You certainly won’t get lost when navigating the site!
This is another case of graphically designing in Photoshop©, HTML and CSS designing in Dreamweaver, and stretching that HTML skin over the skeleton of WordPress.
We also re-designed their logo, which they wanted to match what was already on their trucks.
Dr. Franklin H. Meyer’s website
Check out EdenDentist.com — Dr. Frank Meyer of Eden, NY.
He found us when driving by our office here in Hamburg back in September. His is a simple, clean looking site with a custom CMS. Semi-transparent drop-down menus and a “Verizon footer” are some of the features (We copied the footer style of VerizonWireless.com – Yes, we copy what we like). We also designed his logo as a vector graphic, which can now be enlarged and printed at any size.
Whew it’s about time!
You may notice it’s been just over 6 months since my last post. I’d have liked to have posted about all the things we were doing, but I chose not to draw attention to the old website layout by refraining from such things. Every time a post is published in WordPress, search engines and blog indexing sites are notified of the new content. This is great… if you want to increase your SEO. I was however, waiting until I had a chance to renovate the look of it.
The graphics of this site were completely designed in Photoshop©, the HTML and CSS were designed in Dreamweaver, where I also then stretched it over the WordPress framework. So the finished product looks exactly as it did in the Photoshop mockup (beside a few image optimization techniques for reasonable download time).
Check out the long-awaited portfolio galleries, which are custom of course. With this simple expandable setup, we can easily add content as we see the need. “PrettyPhoto” has become my favorite “lightbox” jQuery plugin, and it’s used extensively here. It’s very flexible and easy to implement on any site.