Follow
the Magic Carpet
In the summer of 2006 my girlfriend and I took a massive roadtrip
from southern Mississippi to Nova Scotia and back. I designed
this website to showcase my trip logs and photographs (work in progress).
It utilitizes a wordpress backend, a custom trip template, a flickr
photo plugin and other goodies. |
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Precision
Camera & Video
Precision Camera & Video is an Austin camera store.
I was their webmaster. Along with standard maintenance
have developed and deployed a new GUI for their site,
and expanded functionality. |
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Americorps - Keep Austin Housed Program
(in development) An online home for the non-profit
Americorps 'Keep Austin Housed' program. |
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TysonLoe.com
Tyson is a local austin photographer. I designed and
developed his site in my spare time. I used php to
implement an easy to use content management system. |
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Jim
Walters IV
Jim is another Austin photographer. I employed the
same content management system on his site. |
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Dayna
Castanedo
Developed to showcase the portfolio of a New Orleans
based Architectural Programmer. |
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Realizations
Realizations is a retail shop that specializes in
hand silcreened repoductions of designs by a local
artist named Walter Inglis Anderson. I designed and
implemented the Site, Product database, and shopping
cart functionality using .html, PHP and MySql, and
Miva Merchant, repectively. |
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Newcomb
Center for Research on Women
The Newcomb Center for Research on Women is part of
Tulane University. I worked under their education
coordinator, Crystal Kile, to help maintain and develop
their site. |
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Dayna
Castanedo
Developed to showcase the portfolio of a New Orleans
based Architectural Programmer. |
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- Keep it simple - Though having text that flies onto the screen in an aerial ballet and is shaped like swans might be pretty, it certainly wouldn't be legilble. A good designer knows when to stop himself.
- Maximum Compatibility - Build for multiple resolutions (at least 800 x 600 and up), multiple browsers (at least IE and Netscape 4 and above), and multiple operating systems. Though a web designer can be counted on to have the latest browser and plugins, a customer can't.
- Use up the screen (make site scalable) - A user should never feel that what he is looking at was optimized for a different screen size. Whether by making your pages scalable or by designing a different set of pages for each screen resolution, make sure you always fill up the screen.
- Integrate well with parent or affiliate sites - Related sites should have related color schemes and navigation
- Make primary sections of site accessible from any page on the site - Determine the most important parts of the site, and make sure the user is never more than one click away from them
- Make clear on every page where that page falls in the site hierarchy - Like the 'you are here' maps at the mall, users should have a clear impression from every page in the site of where they are in relation to the rest of the site.
- Determine the user's needs, and design to them - Whether by surveys or site statistics, find out what the user wants and requires in regards to the services that you are providing, and design to that. After the design, do extensive beta testing to make sure you got it right.
- Organize site resources before you design - It never ends well when you build the walls before laying the foundation.
- Format Pages consistently (using template or CSS) - The layout and color scheme should be consistent for every page in your site - don't train users to look for the navigation bar at the top and then randomly stick it at the bottom.
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