• Rotating images for the three latest posts.
• Archive of all posts.
• News feed of stories related to human rights and corporate social responsibility.
• Easily add authors with biographies and photographs.
• User-friendly forums
• An easy way to create endnotes for research articles.
• Articles must be downloadable as PDFs.

My favorite part of this job was creating the WordPress plugin List Contributors, simply because it’s a very versatile little tool that I imagine I’ll be using on some future projects.

I also enjoyed trouble-shooting the downloadable PDFs. I really hate redundant data entry since it probably means that someone isn’t doing their job properly. The solution I came up with has the benefits of working from the same data (saves on server resources) and offloading most of the heavy lifting to someone else (in this case, pdfmyurl.com). The full explanation of the process can be found here.

This is the second site I’ve ever built for which I wasn’t asked to do the actual design and layout. I don’t know what my clients are trying to tell me.

Visit the site.

Getting the production site up and running took a little longer than I predicted due to a late-in-the-game design decision, but I’m much happier with where it wound up than I would have been.

The center-piece of the site, the portfolio slider on the front page, uses the Page Thumbnail functionality of WordPress 2.9 to make it ridiculously easy to add new items. This is unlike the slider on my front page, which is hand-crafted in Coda because I don’t want the XHTML section of my brain to atrophy.

Since there is a secondary slider on the portfolio pages, I set the thumbnail sizes in WordPress to generate the appropriate sizes so that each image only had to be uploaded one time in one place to put the correct images in both places.

The Road Not Taken

The first iterations of the design were very dark, brooding almost. Paul Lucci, my partner in crime over at Crooked Gremlins, was brought on to do the illustration work and to help with the logo. The first ideas we had matched the attitude of the site, which was way too serious.

The Metal Goddess, indicating strength

The game-board, indicating strategy

Ultimately, the client wanted a more light-hearted look, which we pulled off with a lighter color palette and brighter imagery in the slider.

The Services Section

One of the last pieces of the site to come together was the Services section. I’m still kind of amazed how it only takes one or two ideas to make a thing that seemed totally broken and unapproachable a nice thing to look at.

Paul provided the illustrations here, as well.

Visit the site

The old design; too blog-like for a musical group.

One of the group’s best features is, well, them. The photo rotator that I built for the first site was just too small. The new rotator, built with jQuery and updated automatically from a file directory that they can easily maintain, is much more dynamic and appealing, as well as a more significant part of the design.

A fresh look for the tiger

I went back to the drawing board for this one, allowing what I know about the group to inform more of the design choices I made. Shere Khan has been a Princeton institution since 1993, so I thought it appropriate to build a design that had a vintage and slightly wealthier kind of feel to it. The rich red leather of the logo and the buttons remind me of this old chair my grandfather had, which always makes me think of age and money.

I also wanted to reorganize the information flow of the site, after gaining a better understanding of the priorities of the group. The most important stuff (Upcoming Events, Listen to Clips, Watch videos, Have you met) now sits at the bottom of every page, making it much more accessible to a first-time visitor.

Since this was a pro-bono project (my little brother is in the group, and their previous website was simply unacceptable for a member of my family to be featured on) I had to save time wherever I could. A fantastic tutorial for building a textured website header in Photoshop gave me the idea for a wall-papered background, and I implemented a very close version of it for the final design. I’ll post the link if I can ever find it again.

The new image slider is randomized; you never see the same show twice.

I did extensive testing with Internet Explorer 6, as well as people that are browsing without JavaScript enabled. The site looks and functions perfectly under almost all circumstances.

The big back-end switch

The original site was built on the Joomla! platform, which I no longer use. On aesthetics, function and template customization, WordPress just wipes the floor with its open-source cousin. And since I was redesigning the site anyway, it just made sense to transition over to a WordPress install.

The management systems for the members, news posts, tours and photo galleries needed to be much easier to use than the ones offered by Joomla! The built-in category systems WordPress uses allowed me to design an intuitive back-end experience for the group without sacrificing front-end design aesthetics.

A fresh login

Instead of having the login form appear on every page, which is kind of amateurish, I took the opportunity to utilize one of my favorite WordPress plugins; BM Custom Login. This allowed a reinforcement of the new branding, which I will get to in a moment.

Simplified logo, reinforcing the brand.

New branding

It’s a bit misleading to say “new” branding, which implies that the group had a solid logo in the first place. Since I wasn’t able to devote any time to creating a logo, I went with the most direct option available to me; the letters “SK.” I know that the group refers to themselves as SK in conversation, so I figured I may as well go with what the people know.

To match the overall classic feel of the new design, I included the EST date of the group to lend it an air of authenticity, as if this is what the logo had always been.

Visit the site

Member features

The group wanted a more robust section for the Shere Khan alumni. With a few simple plugins, such as Page Restriction and SimpleForum, it was easy to implement. I’m interested to see what problems arise with these systems, since I know that not everyone in the group is as tech-savvy as the others.

Visit the site

It was necessary to create a visual aesthetic that synced up with their current organizational philosophy and structure.

The “wow” factor: A new kind of slider. A great deal of my professional life is consumed by people’s love of jQuery, which is awkward since I can’t lay any claim to the scripting itself. I simply put it in front of people and let them say “Whoa.”

This slider differs from the RealPolitech slider in that it uses text links at the bottom of the imagery for navigation, as opposed to vertical slats that eat up a bunch of space.

Visit the Andre Sobel site.

Deceptively simple

This site contains a great deal of content. which may not be apparent to the average user. This is the designer/developer’s job; make it look easy. If a user feels encumbered or inconvenienced by your website, they will not come back.

Any student of web design, when confronted in a moment of honesty, will tell you that they continually search for ways to make sites simpler. The two words that we hear the most in our line of business? Clean + Simple.

By way of comparison, here is a screen shot of their previous design.

The sites needs to show off not only the work that the consortium does/can do, but also the people within the organization.

“Wow” Factor: The slider on the People page. Uses jQuery and draws from dynamic posts (as opposed to being hard-coded into the template.)

Visit RealPolitech.

Required a multiple-level CSS dropdown menu to contain the vast multitude of categories and sub-categories the client wanted. Also, site contains custom Javascript for mortgage calculators.

Note – The site owner has changed the original look of the site. The above image represents the agreed-upon design.

Creative Brief: Website for people to interact with a live event – A Gala held on the eve of the 2009 Presidential Inauguration. Also direct, provide technical support and produce content for the six hour live webcast.

This site was built on the WordPress CMS to integrate with live blogging tools such as ScribbleLive and Twitter. The webcast featured the hostess Shia Lazar interviewing several VIPs, including Art Bushkin of StarGazer.org and Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy.

Necessary features:

• UStream feed of event.
• Live blog feed from multiple bloggers.
• Twitter integration.

Visit the LINK-live website.

This site was built with on the Joomla CMS so that the members of the group could update it themselves. Since they’re a musical group, they also needed rich media integration.

Necessary features:

• Member’s section.
• A blog with an RSS feed.
• A prominent “Hire Us” button.
• Image rotator.
• Audio clips.

Visit the Shere Khan website.

When I first started Out to Lunch, I wanted to do position myself as a one-stop shop for anything creative, from print work to photography to web sites to videos… really anything.

Of course, since this is typically a solo operation, there was no way I could devote the necessary resources to promoting and competing in all of those fields simultaneously. Or, if I did, I wouldn’t have any time left to actually produce anything worth looking at.

Here is a “before” shot of my website. I will keep it up until I can no longer stand to look at it, which may not be too far off.

I’m sure you see what I mean.