Web Sites

UU're Home is a bed and breakfast directory for Unitarian Universalists. This update changed the site from a relativelystatic HTML site to Joomla. It also got away from a credit card merchant system which was both clunky and the vendor maybe was going out of business, to one that was Paypal based. The key decision here, after picking Joomla, was to bring in Mighty Membership and Registration. Mighty is a 3rd party provider of Joomla components and had pretty much done everything I wanted in a framework. The Membership component does have a flexible subscription plan and the UU're Home folks get an online DB of their members. Plus a number of other features that are there when they get around to wanting them. I did have to write a Joomla component to get at the My SQL based hosting data, that was perhaps the hardest technology bit.

Updated in 2016, which changed to MembershipPro (MP) and moved the hosting to Dreamhost. With this update, the site now uses responsive design. The Joomla template has the guts of Bootstrap and I made a number of tweaks on layout. MP is a better membership package, for example it provides automatic email notification of upcoming subscription renewals, otherwise it does everything that Mighty had been doing.

SnapPlus (2012-2014)

http://snapplus.wisc.edu

The new SnapPlus web site is built on WordPress using the UW CALS VMware hosting platform. It uses the Atahualpa theme with a Google search enhancement. This site is meant as the front door for support and software downloads of the desktop SnapPlus tool. One of the newer additions this year are the How-to videos, which are Captivate sessions that have been uploaded to YouTube. The tractor logo was built in Illustrator from an outline of a real tractor, then filtered to be more like a hand drawing and finished with 3d like shine.

Town of Sylva (2010-11)

http://townofsylva.org

When I moved to Sylva in 2010, the Town's website was sorely in need of updating. Offering my services as a volunteer to the Town Manager, I lead a process to redesign this site. There was a committee formed by the City Council, which I had go thru a process of understanding what they wanted on the new website. We looked at a number of sites from small cities to see what was possible, as well as what was interesting. The key technology decision was to use GovOffice, which the Town Manager had experience with. I strongly suggest going with a hosted solution, as the Town was not likely to retain IT experienced staff anytime soon. I did work out a design using one of the GovOffice templates. The hardest part with getting the images on the top right, for which I looked at many, many pictures and had much back and forth with the lead from the City Council. Eventually I mucked around with the picture colors and got ones that worked.

Flash slideshow player on Western Carolina University homepage (2010)

http://www.wcu.edu

One new feature that was desired during a redesign of the WCU homepage was a more full featured slideshow. The new slideshow player was one I did in Flash, with a goal of having the content be updatable by a graphic designer who didn't need to bug someone on my team. It also had to be accessible. Working with the graphic designer, we came up with an overlay that put the WCU "swishes" in and I borrowed the big forward/backward controls from Purdue's home page. This has worked very well for the PR folks who own the home page and also give the site a more contemporary feel.

Arboretum Cohousing (2007-08)

http://arboretumcohousing.org

Arboretum Cohousing was a $9.6M, 40 unit, urban infill development in Madison WI. The main marketing tool was a website, which I put together using static PHP (only includes and a few variables) and DHTML menus. This was a clone of the earlier uuprairie.org site, as I it was only going to be me creating and updating it. While nothing was particularly hard, I did fuss over the aesthetics of how unit plans and site plans looked on the site. There were a few slideshows from Google Picasaweb and a YouTube video for a small bit of fun. While the unit plans have come down, everything has sold out, I do have a copy if it is useful to see how this looked during the sales period.

Prairie UU Society (2006)

http://uuprairie.org

Prairie UU Society was sorely in need of an update to their website and being a web professional I offered to help. After many meetings, this is the UU way right :-), I put together a fairly simple design. Having photos on the top and a left menu that would expand to show picks were the main features everyone liked. This was done using simple PHP and some DHTML. No database was used, I wanted to stay away from that I as I didn't see anyone but me that would get to maintain it. One flourish was to create a simple text area on the home page that the administrator could easily update without looking at a bunch of PHP/HTML.