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

• Motivation.
  You’re more likely to do something if you know someone is counting on you.
• Feeling good.
  You’re volunteering by doing something that you wanted to do anyway (drive to the polls).
• Connecting.
  Coming together with new people, however brief and for what ever reason, is an opportunity we can ill afford to miss these days. This is especially true when it facilitates a common civic purpose, like helping people cast their ballots.

To help sort out the complexity of this project, I’ve broken it down into the major parts: The signup form,the poll locator/Google Map, the messaging system and the user matcher.

The Signup Form

As with all my projects, jQuery plays the lead role. I wanted an AJAX form on the front page for people to sign up, and I couldn’t think of any way to make all the requisite text boxes look good. Using jQuery, I was easily able to split them up into a slider that would only allow users to progress to the next step once they’ve completed the necessary bits.

We wanted to make the signup process as simple as possible so anyone could do it, so we only asked for information that was absolutely necessary;

• Rider or Driver
• Where you vote
• Display name
• Email
• Password

User-friendly signup

I didn’t want to take on the task of developing a user management system from scratch, so I decided to build the site in WordPress. By using the Register Plus plugin, I was able to create a login page that asked for all the necessary information. I then took that form and created the jQuery scrolling signup form for the front page.

Using simple hide() and fadeIn() commands, I was able to prevent users from moving ahead too quickly in the form. They couldn’t click the “Next” button until they had successfully completed the part of the form they were looking at. This proved to be essential for the poll locator, which I’ll talk about in a moment.

Aside from their status as a rider or a driver, the most important piece of information we needed was the street address of the polling place of each individual user. This brings me to…

The Poll Locator

The League of Women Voters built a database of polling places that is searchable by mailing address. They call it Vote411.Org, and without VoterPool couldn’t function.

Because we wanted to match people by their polling places, we couldn’t use something as broad as a ZIP code. Densely populated urban areas like New York City and Los Angeles simply have too many polling places for a system like that to be useful. So, I needed to create a solution that could take a variety of input styles (all uppercase, no capitalization, whatever) and create uniform outputs of polling place addresses.

By combining AJAX with a customized PHP cURL script and the Vote411.Org database, I found our answer. More importantly, if no address comes back from Vote411, the “Next” button won’t appear, meaning that particular user can’t continue. It’s a very effective way of preventing people from signing up with the wrong polling place address.

Searchable Google Map

Searchable Google Map

I had to search for quite a while before I found the answer to this, but by using a MySQL query to print out their polling place’s street address and the Google Maps API, I was able to add a searchable Google map that starts centered on their specific polling place to each user’s page.

It was important that they be able to search the area near their polling place so they could easily find good, public pickup spots. Remember, these were going to be perfect strangers arranging carpools, and people usually behave better when they know someone is watching. Also, Google provides a good set of route planning tools.

The Messaging System

Next to the cURL script that finds the polling place street address, the thing I’m most proud of creating for this project is the custom messaging system.

A big gap in the user functionality that WordPress provides is the ability to message other users. There are a few plugins out there that do it, but none of them allow for front-end access to the messaging system. I didn’t want users mucking around in the WordPress back-end, so I decided to write my own.

I want to take a moment and state that this, this right here, is why I love open-source scripting languages. If the thing you want doesn’t exist, just make it yourself.

The first thing I did was create a MySQL table specifically for messages. Every message contains its own ID, the user ID of the sender, the user ID of the receiver, and the message itself. By cross-referencing the user IDs that WordPress assigns each user, each display name is matched with the appropriate user.

To get the most out of using WordPress, I decided to look into the wp_mail() function. Turns out, you can do quite a bit with it. The most obvious is email alerts to new messages. But, by allowing users to assign phone numbers to their accounts, they can receive text messages to their cell-phones by using the email-to-text function that most carriers provide.

The User Matcher

This actually turned out to be the simplest part of the entire process. Once I had normalized the street addresses that came back from Vote411.Org, it was a simple MySQL query to print out a list of users that matched the same address. Then, running that list through a filter (so drivers only see riders and riders only see drivers) was the last step.

Moving past a beta

VoterPool is up and running, but I won’t know how successful it can be until people start trying to use it. Most of the feedback has been either positive or helpful, which is exactly what someone like me hopes for. What I’m looking forward to learning about next are things like server load, cycles and RAM.

Yes. Weird things excite me.

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.

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.