I worked with John on a number of projects in the late summer of 2008, before heading back to NESCom for my Sophmore year.  Being an RA that Fall, I was unfortunately unable to continue work with John beyond the start of the Semester, but the work we did do together was very successful, and a great experience.

While working with Maine Webworks, I had the pleasure of working on websites for Russell Educational Counseling Services, the Libra Foundation, the Libra Lecture Fund, and author Pat Snyder.

For all of these projects I was supplied with a PSD layout that I was tasked with translating into a working template, either for a flat-file website or Content Management System.

The most straightforward of these projects were the templates for the Libra Future Fund and Foundation.  Both sites had identical semantic structure, with the only difference being their color scheme and a few key graphical elements.  After massaging the CSS for the first template, the second was nearly drag and drop, utilizing a common CSS file for the common layout, and a separate CSS file for the respective color schemes.

The development time for the LFF websites was on the order of only a few hours.

The Russell Educational Counseling Services website provided a number of interesting hurdles to overcome, however the result was a per-pixel match to the supplied PSD.  The first challenge was the curved navigation menu, having a curved navigation surface with transparency and a roll-over effect,

The site was co-designed by myself and another student in the 2009 Spring Web Design 3 class at NESCom.

The design in integrated into a WordPress install for Content Management and the theme includes original PHP and Flash elements.  Theme generation from the Design documents was performed by myself, as well as development of the Flash and PHP elements.

The project was considered finished at the conclusion of the Spring 2009 semester and further upkeep is managed my the Boat School, Husson, staff.  Continued support is provided by request.

The task was to create a website design for an original company and place it on top of a very crude PHP templating engine that had been created during the class as an introduction to the PHP programming language.  However, having already had extensive experience in PHP, skinning what was essentially a flat-file (HTML) website coded in PHP quickly got out of hand.

The end result was a complex web-application with flat-file storage, action hooks and content filters (a tip of the hat to my experiences with the WordPress API), a custom send-mail engine for notices and AJAX front-end.  The conclusion of the project halted development just shy of the beginning of an administrative back-end.

I feel the Bassackwards Pub and Brewery website illustrates one of my strongest traits in the Web Development and Design arenas: I have a passion for forward movement through self-discovery and mastery of the technology put before me.

Building upon the task before me was not a decision for me to make, it was a calling; and the challenges I faced during the short development cycle were not daunting, but embraced, and built upon.

Development has continued on the website over the years following it’s initial release, introducing original PHP for a banner rotator, Facebook Integration and an online Reservation submission system.

Support for this domain continues, and customer satisfaction remains.

Keri was still very pleased with the design of her website, but she was finding it more and more difficult to manage the increasingly larger number of sample photographs, testimonials, affiliates, and just general information on her website.  When we initially talked, the primary topic was, “how do we work with what is here.”  However, as it became increasingly more apparent that the structure of the flat-file site did not lend its self to painless client modification, we decided a more Content Managed approach to her site was needed.

Her original design fulfilled her basic needs, but needed a little more polish, so I first began by taking the general structure and building template in Photoshop that had just the right amount of pop, while keeping with the general ascetics that Keri had grown fond of in her previous design.  I then broke this out into a WordPress template  that would be flexible enough to accommodate her needs and growing content, and allow her to make adjustments and additions herself in the future.

I am, and have always been, a big advocate of utilizing WordPress as a basic CMS for small, personal websites, and in Keri’s case, it worked out well.  WordPress is a great foundation for a smal business website because it has most, if not all, of the functionality of a large and expensive Content Management System built into it, is highly customizable out of the gate, and it is Free (a price anyone can come to terms with).

At the time of this redesign, WordPress did not have gallery functionality built in to it’s core yet, and as such I integrated Gallery2 into her WordPress site via WPG2, and customized a default Gallery2 template to better blend her sample galleries with the theme of the rest of her site.

The result was a simple, elegant, and integrated site for a phenomenal photographer.