Stepping Stone Software

I just found out that a quickie site that I designed back in October/November 2008 just launched… at the end of February 2010. It is a site for Stepping Stone Software, a product by Bluegrass.net. Stepping Stone is a web-based management system for Foster Care centers. It allows them to manage those under their care, adoption procedures, medical considerations, and much more. Good luck to BGN in launching this product!

Security Innovations

Security Innovations, a surveillance and security firm in Ohio, has received a new site. Validation for HTML 5, some CSS 3 add-ons (which unfortunately are the only thing preventing validation), and built w/ PHP, the new site is available for you to view at anytime. It uses a little javascript for the rotating banner on the homepage, and has some flash animations on some of the interior pages. Videos are embedded on the Video page utilizing Flowplayer.

Maverick Wine Gifts.com

I recently worked on a new site design (as well as some branding for new wines) for Maverick Wine Group’s new http://www.maverickwinegifts.com/. The site design was completed by myself, and I also coded the homepage. The store pages were coded by and are provided by Nexternal.com.

Unfortunately, none of the projects went anywhere, and these designs will never be used. Before the halt, the first two images were approved, and I began coding them into a wordpress theme as well as an OsCommerce theme. The video area was going to be custom built to interface with both of the aforementioned platforms via plugins/add-ons. I’m presenting the mockups here to catalog at least some of the massive amount of work that I poured into the project before it was ghostbusted.

Waverly Hills Mockup (2008)

Waverly Hills Mockup (2008)

Waverly Hills Mockup (2008)

Waverly Hills Mockup (2008)

Green Mountain Transportation Site

Green Mountain needed to make some inroads to having a web presence in early 2009. They didn’t have much of a budget, so we put together this 1-page site for them.

Ready Cab screen shot

Several months ago, I completed a new site for one of the most trusted names in Louisville transportation – Ready Cab. Their new site has a CMS system so they can keep the site up to date, has a Flight Checker so you can see if flights are on time, and you can even place a cab reservation on their site.

Check out their site at readycab.com

Louisville Urban League (Live site)

Louisville Urban League – built on Joomla. This is one of the first Joomla sites that I’ve been able to see from start to finish using the system. I help maintain a number of other sites built on Joomla, and while I’ve upgraded and added on to those sites, I didn’t create the original versions. So this project was a really good chance to get into the nitty gritty of putting a Joomla installation to work. I even got it to validate (CSS 2/XHTML 1.0). Unfortunately, as tends to happen with CMS sites, I’m sure it won’t validate forever once a lot of new content is added, but that’s OK.

Some neat things on this site include fully customizable (by the client) sidebars – I tend to code most sites with hardcoded sidebars to limit the amount of room possible to break away from the design. And absolutely no offense to the clients, but they’re coming to me because of my experience in providing that structure or design. This site is one of the rare cases where I felt that there was a knowledgeable team that could take care of any of those content changes as well as keep a consistent layout.

The LUL can also accept form data that they set up themselves through the CMS. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a plugin that I coded myself, but it will work well for them. If they choose, an individual form’s input can be saved to an excel file, CSV, or other options.

One note about this site – I had more design revisions on this site than any other site I’d worked on at the time. The original designs were a bit more dynamic and had a little bit more “pop” (boss’ word, not mine) in my opinion. But hey, as long as the client is happy, right? I included one of the earlier (but not the first) designs below.

CSS Validation (LUL.org)

XHTML validation (lul.org)

an earlier version of lul.org

Team MDO screen shot

The Team MDO site was launched back in December, 2008. The site is an online information hub for the MDO Youth Sports organization based here in Louisville, KY. Each summer, they host a week long sports competition with deaf youth athletes from all over the United States.

Development of this site is ongoing, currently utilizing WordPress, a gallery plugin, several dynamic PDFs (assembled by me while at Louisville Web Group), and a number of videos converted and placed by myself utilizing FlowPlayer.