Portfolio

Richard Godwin Website

Thursday, October 14th, 2010
Richard Godwin Website Richard Godwin Blog - Welcome to the Slaughterhouse

I have finished working on another freelance website for a client, its called richardgodwin.net, and as you probably guessed it was for a person named Richard Godwin.  Richard is a really talented writer of dark crime fiction and noir,  and is about to publish his book, called ‘Apostle Rising.’  He had two blogs already that he consistently updated, so it was an obvious choice to build his site off of the WordPress Framework. Another reason I built the site using the WordPress framework is because of the awesome admin section it has. It really does do a great job in allowing the client to change the content on the website whenever they want, especially when they don’t have any coding knowledge.

As I worked on the site, Richard hired a graphic designer named Matthew Swann to finalize some graphics for the site. I usually do the graphics as well for the sites I work on, but it was a nice change of pace to have some help and it was really great working with Matthew.

There are a few special things I did for this site, that I want to list off here. There was a great plugin called WordPress.com Stats from their old site, that I implemented into their new site that lets them view their hits and pageviews from the WordPress dashboard. There were some problems initially with it but I fixed it by going into phpMyAdmin and messing with some fields in the SQL database.  For the navigation of the website and blog, they really liked the CSS Horizontal Menus I found on http://www.cssmenumaker.com. So I implemented one of those into the theme, and changed the color around to go with the rest of the site a little better. Another cool item on the site is the Steel Melting Flash Text Effect in the banner. I bought the file from activeden and added it to the site on two different pages. I think it looks really great and it achieved the flashy effect that Richard was wanting for announcing his upcoming book.

The last thing I want to talk about is the new default theme for WordPress called Twenty Ten. I created his blog theme from the Twenty Ten Theme and I just wanted to say that it was really easy to work with and modify, and that it comes with a ton more admin options in the dashboard area that the old default theme was really missing. My hat goes off to the WordPress team as they constantly raise the bar of their product again and again.

Cya

Flash News Feed Ticker

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Flash News Feed Ticker

I have just finished working on another file for sale on ActiveDen and its a Flash News Feed Ticker. This is the second version of my News Feed Ticker, and the biggest difference is that I implemented an XML file to style it and for customization reasons, and it has a lot of improvements including:

  • It’s compatible with all feed types (RSS and ATOM )
  • This ticker automatically grabs the first image in each feed post to display
  • It updates automatically
  • It is completely customizable through an XML file so there is no need to even open up Flash to edit it
  • Completely re-sizable so that it fits to any size container
  • Easy to change the number of posts you want displayed

This news feed ticker, or reader as some people call them, includes three different skins or themes: a dark, a light, and a social media skin. Also if you want to customize the look and feel of it, you can do this very easily by editing the colors in the XML settings file or by editing the symbols in the Flash file’s library. Also there is an in-depth help file included.

Cya

Featured Author of the Week on ActiveDen

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Since joining ActiveDen, where you can buy and sell royalty-free Adobe Flash and Flex files, I have wanted to make the featured author of the week. I am proud to announce that I have finally achieved this goal of mine.  I am really honored and humbled to be chosen and want to thank Envato (The Company that owns  the marketplace) for selecting me, especially LanceSnider, the ActiveDen Site Manager. If you have ever thought about selling graphics, or wordpress themes, or anything of that nature then the Envato Marketplaces are the way to go.  These sites have the best community of authors and buyers.

Its really been amazing creating files and seeing people use them on their own sites, and  there is something really rewarding in it thats hard to articulate with words. Thanks again ActiveDen for the opportunity you give us and for the feature.

Cya

The New DataPath Website

Friday, August 20th, 2010

First off, sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I have been super busy at work.  Speaking of work, I am currently employed at a company called DataPath, Inc. in Little Rock, AR as a “Marketing and Web Developer” and I love it.  About 5 months ago, I accepted a new project of redesigning and developing the company website, while integrating it with what was there already which included a backend CMS and SQL database. This was a huge undertaking because  it was originally developed in 1997 in dirty ASP.

This was very exciting for me because it was the first big project I undertook at the company, and it allowed me to show off my skills and worth  (plus I could learn a lot along the way).  Long story short, I got a redesign approved and started hacking away at developing.

Some of the special features I integrated or developed into the new site include:

  1. a new navigation system, which include the main drop down navigation as well as a side accordian-like structure navigation (all programmed in javascript)
  2. a new overall design with consistency and flow, because before the site was very unorganized and sloppy
  3. bookmarks, for increased user friendliness to navigation the site
  4. Flash based graphics and advertisements, this was huge because as you know I  love Flash

Here are some before and after pictures of the site, click on them to view a larger image (sorry some of them might be a little fuzzy but I had to resize them down to fit a 800 x 600 dimension).

BEFORE AFTER
frontofdpath frontofdpathnew
aboutdpath aboutdpathnew
productsdpath productsdpathnew
servicesdpath servicesdpathnew
resourcesdpath resourcesdpathnew
logindpath logindpathnew
sitemapdpath sitemapdpathnew
Here are a few before and after pictures of the navigation, click on them for a larger image.
navigationdpath navigationdpathnew

Cya

Change of Status.com Website

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

I have finished redesigning another website called changeofstatus.com. The purpose of the site is to help simplify and minimize the confusion involved in an employee’s change of status (sometimes called a “life event”) as it pertains to their various healthcare benefit plans. When someone gets married or looses a dependent, usually things like this are considered life events and allow the employee to change their benefit package accordingly, so they are not paying for something they do not need. Also on the change of Status website there is a tool that converts the complicated employee change of benefits status matrix to an easy-to-use, three-step wizard, allowing employees, employers and administrators to determine what life events are permitted under IRS rules and regulations. I redesigned the site completely, you can see the site images above. The image on the right is the ‘before’ image, and the image on the left is the ‘after’. I used this template before on other company websites and I thought I do the same for this site to keep the branding consistent overall.

The site uses the jQuery Cycle Plugin for the banner rotater so that its visible even on devices like phones that don’t run Flash. Also, the website is completely SEO friendly. This is another case where I put my SEO checklist to work and it has helped tremendously. Previously the site was around 500 hits a month. Now even after a couple weeks, it has raised to over 1,500 hits a month. I’ll post the google analytics pictures as soon as I can.

Cya