Recently I started playing drums for a band here in San Diego. There website was completly Flash based when I came aboard. This ofcourse poses a few issues. Number one search engines can not crawl Flash content, thus making the possibility of a solid web presence very unlikely. Number two, not everyone has broadband. The solution, a static HTML version. The design is very simple. I didn't want to get too complicated, but it still needed to resemble the flash version of the site. It is XHTML compliant has a few interseting things going on behind the scene. The flash content is actually derived from text files. I made the "static" pages access that same content. This allows me to make changes in one place and have the effects seen on both the flash and HTML site. You can't beat solid markup.

Ronthebusnut.com is a completely custom ecommerce solution. The backend is written in php and interfaces with a mysql database. The entire site is also driven by the smarty template engine. Ronthebusnut.com has a secure administrative frontend giving the owner the ability to adminstrate orders and add products. The site has been tailored to interface with other data sources as well. Because the site is served locally at the warehouse, the sites server talks to the shipping system and the shipping system talks back to the server. Once the server knows that an order has been shipped, it than talks to UPS's server and gets the tracking info in XML. The server than parses the XML and displays the data on a user friendly order display page. This and many other custom tailored features have made Ronthebusnut.com a blast to create.

This was an ambitious experiment. The site is very efficient and the source code is extremely clean. The look of the site is completely controlled by the attached style sheet. It uses "tableless" layout markup, as tables should not be used for layout purposes. Each page validates to W3C's XHTML Transitional and CSS web standards. The website was designed from the beggining to be as dynamic and database driven as possible, while apearing static to the outside world. The entire site is crawlable by a searchengine, and uses static names with variables encoded into them, ex. NCIdetails24_5.html as opposed to details.php?region=NCI&id=24&num=5. The site also features a custom backend CMS with a WYSIWYG editor. One more point of interest is the overview functionality on the detail or listing pages, (from the sitemap click "North County Inland San Diego Homes"). Once onto the listing page click "Clairemont Overview" in the orange box on your right. This brings up the overview box which let's you choose other information about the community such as weather or crime data. The interesting part about this is that the information is actually being retrieved from the server behind the scenes. When you click on Weather or Statistics, your browser uses a function called XMLHttpRequest to retrieve XML data from the server and puts it onto the current page. This makes for a very rich application, also one that is bandwidth friendly. Accesssandiego.com was allot of fun to build and a blast to try new technology with.

Sentencesermons.com is a promotional site for a contemporary author. This site showcases his books and trys to promote his mission. The site has a simple clean layout and is relatively static. It does however have a small backend, which allows the administrator to change the front page "sermon of the week" via a php script. The site was created in Dreamweaver, and uses its template engine. Clean and simple is the name of the game often times.

Hope College, my alma mater, had me create a web site for the art department. The site was designed in Dreamweaver and utilizes Dreamweaver templates. It never reached completion due to difficulties with new standardization policies. The site features students, faculty, and events. The design process was very helpfull because of constant interaction with faculty and administration. Making everyone happy is no easy task.