Manifest Development Redesign 2011: The Portfolio
For the second part of this series, I want to talk about putting my new portfolio together. The portfolio is the most important area for a web developer because it gives the user insight into the type of work he or she does, so I wanted to do it right. It’s now in two places, and is managed a completely different way on the backend. Â Let’s take a look.Manifest Development Redesign 2011: The Homepage
[singlepic id=7 w=320 h=240 float=right]Â Last week I launched a redesign of my freelance site, Manifest Development. I started developing it in late November, and wanted to revamp the site completely from design to content. I got some feedback from my students during one class when we were talking about the importance of a small business’ website, and I wanted to integrate that, as well as some of the new things I learned over the last two years. I’m planning on making this a multipart series, and in today’s installment, I want to talk about the most important part of a website: The Homepage.
Directory Handler at Theme Forest
I’m happy to announce my first Theme Forest component, Directory Handler. it’s a simple set of 2 classes that handle (in several ways) listing the contents of a directory. The main class,
DirectoryHandler, includes several functions that:- Get and/or print the entire contents of a directory
- Normalize the name of a file or directory (replace special characters with spaces)
- Return the extension of a file
- Return all of the files of a directory in an array
- Return all of the sub directories of a directory in an array
The
ImageDirectoryclass extends the functionality ofDirectoryHandlerby changing the get and print directory functions to:- Print a thumbnail version of the image
- Integrate lightbox for easy image viewing/browsing.
You can view a live demo here and Download the full documentation here.
Burke Website Launched
Cross posted at Manifest Development
After several months of design and development, I am proud to announce the launch of Burke Catholic High School’s new website. Burke first came to me back in November seeking a new, more interactive, easier to update website geared towards current students, parents,and prospective families. In development, I created the first iteration of Minerva CMS, a content management system powered by WordPress and geared towards high schools.Scrubs Quotes App
I don’t do too many things on a whim, but the other night when I saw a group dedicated to having a Scrubs Quotes Facebook application developed, I couldn’t help myself. As a big fan of Scrubs, as well as a developer, I thought I might try my hand at it. I tinkered a little with Facebook apps and it seemed easy enough. I set out that night to do that app, and finished it the next day.
I figured I did not need a database for this project. Just a text file with a quote per line. I’d throw in some HTML when needed, and the last two characters of the file are the person’s initials. For example:
Hey, Girl's Name - <strong>Dr. Cox</strong> pc. In the processing of each line, I use the initials to display the picture of the character in the profile.For a project like this, following Facebook’s Step-by-Step Guide is all that’s necessary. Facebook provides great documentation on creating apps, and as long as you know some programming language, you should be able to pick it up pretty easily. For those of you who have Facebook, you can check out the app here. If you don’t have Facebook, I’ve provided screen shots.
In the near future I hope to add more quotes, and make it more user interactive by allowing them to add their own quote to their profile if they don’t want a random one.
Scranton Wilke Barre Direct
Scranton Wilkes Barre Direct is an online directory for businesses in the area. Developed with my friend Dan, who did the design work, we needed to create something scalable and easy to use. They wanted featured ads, regular ads, 160+ categories and many ways to organize them. We created a most popular categories section on the homepage (defined by the owners of the site), wrote a search, and I defined the database so that all ads were added into a main and sub location.
The site is also (for the most part) completely driven by a custom made Content Management System. This system allows the owners to ad, edit and delete ads, business, categories, events and locations. They also control if sites are displayed on the site and if they are featured ads, which show up in special places on the site. Finally, they can make categories appear on the home page. All in all this was a good project that allowed me to do some cool new things programming wise. With 700+ lines of functions alone, there is a lot going on in the background that I feel is pretty transparent to the user.
New Design Launch!
Announcing (finally), the new design of TheJoey.Net. You may have noticed over the last 2 days, this design was up more and more. I was putting the finishing touches on the design and wanted to see how it looked live, in the flesh. Over the next couple of weeks I will talk about all of the new stuff, including the design, AJAX features, my first crack and a WordPress plugin, and more.
As for right now, I am just happy I finally launched it. I started working on it in late December, and if you’ll recall, I started doing a live update a month ago. Let me know what you think in the comments!
The Gift of Faith Foundation
Bill Conroy contacted me over the summer about creating a website for a non-profit organization he started called The Gift of Faith Foundation, which offers a college scholarship to the winner of an annual contest. What he wanted, to put it in his own words, was something “simple but elegant.”
He gave me a lot of control for the design, but did bring some of his ideas to the table. For example, the images in the background on each page was his idea that I made happen. I used a lot of blues and glowing/light effects to give the website a ‘promising’ and welcoming feel. Since it was religiously based, I tried to capture that kind of heavenly aspect. He also provided text for all of the pages, with the exception of the home page. I felt that it should be pretty informative, as well as just pretty. I added boxes for each major section of the site- separate boxes to give the site a modular, Web 2.0ish feel. While the site is admittedly a simple one, I feel it does accomplish its goal and has enough flare there to make it not boring. Right now I am looking into added an online donation button to the site, probably via Google Checkout. I am of-course, open to suggestions. Later!
Winn Cards and Comics
The Winn Site is a project I have been working on for a couple of months now. The guys wanted a brand new site- the one they had was, umm, bad. They also wanted an online catalog that they could update, along with the ability to update tournament dates. With that in mind, I got started.
The design I gave them was a pretty basic XHTML/CSS layout. The logo was one that they supplied, so I went with that color scheme. I used divs to organize the soon-to-be large amount of information in an aesthetically pleasing way. The challege with the design of this site was that they could add as many products they wanted whereever they wanted, and the design had to be able to handle it. The great part about the site, however, is the programming aspect of it. I created a number of functions to print the catalog info, as well as add, edit and delete to/from the site. The back end I wrote is totally custom, password protected, and designed to be pretty ‘liquid,’ meaning easy to update and manage. They have the ability to add products, including uploading a picture [how to on that in a later post], add tournaments, with custom date and time functions, and add categories which automatically become part of the navigation. They can also edit anything, and delete anything. The product page is the best page on the site, using flow control to change what exactly is displayed on the site. The user can also sort any information on the product pages and there is a search function, making finding any product very easy to do.
All in all it was a good experience, and I learned a lot. I did have experience in coding CMSs before this, such as on my own sites, but this was my first real updatable online catalog. In the near future they hope to add a shopping cart, which it looks like I will also be doing for them. Later!
