Current & recent projects
Below is a list of some recent or on-going projects from around the world.
Business Software selection tool
SoftSelect has started working together with chefbuero(an IT and Manager magazine), offering their visitors the ability to compare their business software needs with what is currently available on the market (or at least listed on www.softselect.de). The existing matching process needed so much tweaking that I decided to more or less start from scratch for the chefbuero standalone. I wanted to use MVC to allow me to update in true DRY fashion. I also wanted to reduce development time with the aid of a PHP framework, so I decided on using CodeIgniter, mainly because of it's small footprint and no need for me to delve around in command line tools like putty. The downside of the project that it needed to be placed in an iFrame with a %width.
trendlux Public Relations
trendlux is a public relations office for the IT and Hi-tech sector, based in Hamburg, Germany. I upgraded the site to incorporate a CMS (MODx), and upgrading it as time permits to incorporate further functionality such as mailing lists, newsletters etc. The site has bilingual functionality (German & English). As a comparison, here is a link to a screenie of the original site. A further aspect was SEO, where the average number of Page Impressions was increased from an average of 3500 pre-relaunch to over 50000 last month, an increase that I am very proud of indeed.
SPEVCO
Spevco has progressed immensely over the last couple of months. It is now a rich media internet platform with a comprehensive client area and project management functionality. An alpha version took 7 hours from PSD (a very tight deadline) to Content Management (including some JavaScript Eye Candy).
Advanced HomeCare
Advanced HomeCare was quite a challenge (from a hardware point of view). It runs on a Windows box running Apache, and we had some strange happenings. Also because of their firewall options, I had absolutely no control over databases and the like. Considering all this, it worked out very well indeed.
Medical Voice Technology Services
Medical Voice Technology Services (MVTS) is a small site, which had a very quick turnaround (I found out it needed doing on Tuesday morning, and Friday was release). Nevertheless I decided to do away with the original table layout and go with a Standards compliant layout for XHTML and CSS as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). I then integrated the design into a MODx CMF backend, built a couple of low-key snippets and we launched on Thursday evening. The client is over the moon.
Visit Medical Voice Technology Services
Green Mountain Gringo
Green Mountain Gringo started out as a small website to accompany it's big brother "Texas Pete". It now offers shopping cart functionality, a kids section, recipes and a FAQ section.
Rattenfänger-Spielgruppe
My wife has been a member of the Pied Piper play in Hameln since she was a child. We decided to put a website together for them a couple of years back. It doesn't need too much updating but really needs an overhaul. It uses PHP to load the template & links. It took about a day to do the design initially and a few hours of playing to get the logo created. It is also lacking some multi-lingual additions....one day soon I will translate it into English, maybe drive it with ModX or CodeIgniter. This is an on-going project.
Winston-Salem State University NAA
The WSSUNAA.org site was a great project to work on. It didn't take very long to make ModX compatible at all. There are some things that need sorting out and the average user can't see all the functionality in the members only area. It includes a download area and user profiling allowing subscribtion members to display their details and other things. In short, there is an entire social network hidden behind the subscribed users login.
Texas Pete
Texas Pete is a content management solution to do away with work intensive updates to TexasPete.com. It will reduce man hours substantially. We are hoping to get TexasPete live as soon as possible. A shopping cart solution will also be available via FoxyCart as we did for its little brother Green Mountain Gringo.
Old Salem
As much as I wish I could say that this project was built on my design ability...unfortunately I can't (well not without lying). The talented Jim Olson (and his crew from Zero Gravity Design ) gave me a call and asked if I would be interested in converting this into a CMS for him. I've done a few odds and ends for him over the years and jumped at the chance. He also wanted an easily updateable calender for the site. The original version was based on Flash. I used it initially, combining it with XML and a couple of douces of PHP, but quickly realised that we would need more room than Flash could offer us when we had more than 2, 3 or maybe more events on one day. The new version uses PHP, mySQL, CSS, JavaScript (amongst other things for an AJAX type update when events are collected without having to load the entire page again). I decided against incorporating an entire JavaScript library and simply adopted a small function that retrieves the data and outputs it to the CSS layer of my choice using CSS, JavaScript and the DOM. For the CMF I am using my all-time favourite ModX.
ansos-shop
This was a project for an ebay shop here in Germany. We had to work on a template that would allow her to create her items using the ebay Tool "Turbo Lister". This caused quite a few little projects that required the odd hack or two to get it to display properly in the Turbo Lister design view and eBay itself. The layout itself uses tables, and we created a slightly different CSS file for the items templates to make them display indentically to the shop layout.
Blessed Being
This is a site for Leandre Warren, an old friend from World of Warcraft. She lives in South Africa and is about to start her own business doing Alternative Healing. Although I've never been into that sort of thing, considering it "Mumbo-Jumbo", I have to admit since meeting her, that there is definately something in it. Even though the project was small, I concentrated on CSS and XHTML validation to optimise for search engines to a maximum.