Web Sites
Everyone needs a web site. But a poorly-organized site is not doing you any good.
People are looking for details about you:
- location
- hours
- products
- history
- contact information
to name just a few. But once they’ve found your site, are they finding the info that they came for?
I can help you to make it easy for your customers by:
- prioritizing and highlighting the important info
- grouping your content into logical sections
- building an intuitive navigation
Your web site is often the first impression they will have of you - make it a good one!
Scroll through the examples below for specifics on the various web site projects that I’ve been involved with. Click on the thumbnail to view larger screen shots.
Altius Brass
A standard HTML-based site for “Calgary’s Premiere Large Brass Ensemble”, of which I am a member. A two-column design features a vertical menu navigation, fluid layout to fit the browser’s width and a fixed background image so as not to interfere with the content.
Visit the site.
Brickburn Asset Management
A Flash-based CMS allows Brickburn to update all of the content and to add or remove news items. A vertical drop-down menu can expand to four levels of navigation, and a Yahoo stock ticker tracks the various investment opportunities that Brickburn offers. Content is centred within the browser and a "Print This Page" link re-formats the content into a print-friendly layout.
Visit the site.
Foster Care Alberta
This site featured a Flash video gallery, which a previous programmer had said was impossible to do. I programmed a way to connect the HTML buttons in the page to the Flash “.swf” file via JavaScript, allowing a user to choose a new video without reloading an entirely new page every time. This made for a faster download of just the video rather than multiple pages. It also meant that updates were safer, as a content change only needed to be made once, rather than across many versions of the same page.
Heroic Hearts
The design for this site called for a multi-level menu structure, but the client didn’t want the menu to expand and collapse as a user went through the site. The solution was to separate each section of the menu to indicate the hierarchy and the use of a different colour to indicate the “breadcrumb” path to the current page.
Join The Band
A recruitment campaign that I designed for the Naval Reserve and Army Reserve Bands in Calgary. A simple poster and matching splash page entice the user to explore one of the best employment opportunities in the music industry. It uses jQuery to pop up an invite to the next rehearsal and features links to a Google Map and a Street View image. All pertinent information for each Band is displayed on their main page for immediate access.
Visit the site.
Next Phase Fitness
A web site doesn’t have to be large nor complicated to be effective. This is an example of a single-page site that tells a user everything they need to know without forcing them to click across multiple pages.
Visit the site.
Okotoks Dawgs Baseball Club
A Flash-based CMS allowed the Okotoks Dawgs to update all of the content and to add or remove news items, player-of-the-week features and other ongoing stories. A dual-menu system highlighted the main sections along the top and the sub-sections along the left. The home page featured several areas that updated themselves automatically whenever a new story was added in the appropriate section, and applied different formatting to the same content in each area.
Okotoks JDawgs Baseball Academy
A sister site to the Okotoks Dawgs’ site, the Flash-based CMS allowed the Okotoks JDawgs to update all of the content and to add or remove news items. A dual-menu system highlighted the main sections along the top and the sub-sections along the left. The home page automatically updated itself whenever a new story was added in the “News” section, and applied different formatting to the same content in each area. This site also featured a photo gallery, allowing the administrators to add and organize photos into multiple albums.
Provoke
Need a web site, tomorrow? I quite literally had one day to build this site. Armed with only a logo and the content, we went from nothing on Monday to live site on Tuesday. A menu that played on their logo’s slanted “e” kept a consistent look across all browsers by using graphics, while still using text headers for search engine optimization (SEO). The client’s original plan was to replace this site with a larger one within a month, but it ended up being used for nearly a year.
Summit Rehab
This project was a refresh of an existing site. The client liked the look and feel, but there was no consistency from page to page - items shifted, the texts used different fonts and sizes, and even some of the colours alternated between different shades. I rebuilt it from the ground up; making a template to build all of the pages from, defining all divisions and sections using proper HTML markup, applying an external Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) for consistent formatting and cropping all graphics to a few specific dimensions. Consistency is one of my main goals in any project and the results of this overhaul were immediately apparent, as the site now had a solid look and feel across all pages.
The University of Calgary Solar Team
The design of this site called for the text and images to be in different boxes from page to page. So the challenge became ensuring that the outlines didn’t change, whether they contained a piece of a larger image or were part of a background shape for the text content. This was another Flash-based CMS site, allowing the team to update the various pages themselves.
The University of Calgary Urban Alliance
A Flash-based CMS allowed the Urban Alliance to update all of the content and to add or remove news items. Each section featured an animation that ran once, even when going from one subsection to another. Use of multiple “.swf” files allowed the animations to be stretched over multiple sections independent of the main timeline and also helped to reduce the initial download size and time.
Walton
This was a gateway site to the various divisions under the Walton umbrella. It featured geo-sensitive content, showing different menus and pages for users in Canada, the US, Germany and Asia. The initial design was scattered over several Photoshop and InDesign files, so my first step was to build one Photoshop file to work from. This ensured clean, well-placed and consistently-sized images across all pages and versions. The PHP, HTML and CSS codes were then created and tested to ensure solid rendering in all browsers.
Visit the site.
Walton Capital Management
This site was built using the Joomla! CMS to allow multiple administrators access to update and maintain the content. It allowed Investors to log in to track their accounts, Sales Teams to access sales materials and Investor Services Reps to register and maintain the users’ online accounts. A self-registration process was added later. It shared a MySQL database with the Walton International site, so a user could log into either site to see their account info. Geo-location code limited access to this site to just Canadian users.
Visit the site.
Walton Group
This was the US portion of the Walton International site. It was built in Joomla! to allow the US office to update and maintain the US-specific content. Geo-location code ensured that only US-based users could access it to meet U.S. Securities requirements.
Walton International Group
This was Walton’s main site. Built using the Joomla! CMS, it featured multiple languages, geo-sensitive content and a login section. It shared a MySQL database with the Walton Capital Management site, allowing the same content to be used on both sites, but with different formatting for each. Numerous plug-ins and extensions were added to expand upon Joomla!’s core functionality, and a lot of custom PHP scripting was also used to custom-tailor the site to meet the needs of the users.
Visit the site.
Western Major Baseball League
The WMBL wanted an easy-to-use CMS for their web site, but also to continue to use their existing statistics program. A redesign was required to tie both parts into a cohesive unified site. A Flash-based CMS allowed the web content managers to upload the latest stories, then a PHP/MySQL-driven solution took over the stats pages, allowing their statisticians to input the daily results. A number of tweaks that I made to the existing database allowed the site to display more-accurate team stats and game results, especially at playoff time.