Promotional website for my class’ grad show. We went with the theme that there’s an outbreak of bad design and that the grad show would be a safe house for the people who practice good design. My classmates Chris Benotto and Greg Fischer designed the promotional posters, which I used as a basis for the website design, in order to keep everything tied together.
Since the site is largely for teaser purposes and therefore wouldn’t have very much content, I decided to design it as a single page site, with each “page” as a section on the long layout. One of these was a graduates profile section, with photos by fellow graduate Jessica Wilson. To tie it in with the mailers we sent out to industry people, I created an RSVP and Invite Code system for the site. Members of our contact committee were able to add contacts to the invite list, each one assigned a randomly generated 4-digit invite code. When guests received the mailer, they could visit the site and enter their invite code to RSVP yes, no or maybe, which would be logged into the system and notify us via email.
I’ve recently been doing some work for One Group, a design agency here in Windsor. I’ve been turning designs by art director Jeff Robillard into fully functional WordPress sites. Yes, WordPress. It may look like it might be in Flash, but it’s actually good old HTML/CSS with some JavaScript magic. Many of the sites I’ve been doing for One Group have involved some tasteful build animations when you visit the site for the first time.
Another feature of the site that, one that you see more in Flash sites, is the dynamically loading pages. Rather than the window reloading for each new page, the content section is simply replaced with the content of the requested page, with some nice little effects before and after it’s loaded. Of course, all of these features are done in a way that should a visitor not have JavaScript on, the site will still function perfectly fine; they’ll just miss out on the animation effects, that’s all.
During my internship at Accent Media (and long afterwards as a subcontract web developer), I worked on an extensive website for the Association of Visual Language Interpreters of Canada (AVLIC), a non-profit, professional association for sign language interpreters. The site, designed largely by Shane Potvin, serves as an information hub for anyone interested in AVLIC, but also serves as a membership and testing system. The members only section of the site features the Canadian Evaluation System (CES) where members take a written test, study instructional videos and later submit their own videos for review.
The registration system is very specialized, managing 3 different membership types, as well as subscriptions to various affiliate chapters (and includes membership renewal and upgrade systems). Both system works through PayPal when payment is involved, creating an order for them based on what they’re paying for; PayPal will then notify the system when payment is received so it can do it’s thing (create and account, update testing status, etc.).
Unlike my other projects, AVLIC.ca was built with Drupal, a system I had never used before, but successfully worked with never the less (though I’ve got to admit, it seems needlessly complicated in some areas). Using PayPal PDT and IPN was also new, but easy enough to figure out.
During my internship at Accent Media, I helped out in the development of the new Spotvin website, designed by owner Shane Potvin. The site is a combination of WordPress (for the blog, portfolio, and about page) and BigCartel (for the store). I was involved in development on both fronts, correcting issues and developing several of the templates on both systems. Some of these issues included the structuring of the portfolio section of the site, getting the shopping cart counter to function outside of the store, as well as several glitches that came up with the shopping pages. I was also the one to come up with the animated tail-wagging version of the logo; a simple but entertaining little add-on. It was certainly an educational experience, as I’m now quite familiar with the BigCartel system as well as how to tie it into WordPress.
The new DXN Canada website was designed by my project partner Shayne Sterling, while I took care of all the coding and development (though I also did a fair amount of design work in the process). DXN Canada, a Windsor based supplier of products for the malaysian company DXN, wanted a new and improved website for selling their products. More importantly, they wanted a website they could easily manage and update regularly.
The latter part was easy, as I build nearly all my sites in WordPress or some other platform to allow the content to be easily manageable by the client. The main challenge though was building a product catalogue and shopping system into the WordPress platform. I was able to meet the challenge, setting it up so the product catalogue and orders database are both easily accessible to the client for managing (including easily marking products as out of stock with a click, and making adjustments to orders placed should a customer call to correct a quantity error.
DXN Canada has claimed significantly improved sales since using their new website.
My web design and development blog, where I wrote articles and tutorials related to web design (abandoned for the moment; I’m not quite cut out for blogging). Because of the name, I had tried a sketched, almost grungy style to the site, but after having that design for less than a month, I decided to revamp it into a much cleaner style, but keeping the paper and pencil colour scheme. However, I did keep the sketched part of the style alive, but limited it to the editorial illustrations I drew up for each article.
The footer is almost a page unto itself, with sections showcasing my portfolio pieces (from my original portfolio site), books and articles I recommend reading, and of course, a contact form for any questions. Like my portfolio site(s), this was built with WordPress.
