Stuff I've Worked OnFor the last several years I've done a lot of subcontracting— developing another contractor's design, for instance, or implementing a web front-end for a data-base application. Working as part of a team is a good thing. All of the participants get to concentrate on what they do best and a group-mind, when the member's get along, can be a very smart thing. But it sure messes with a portfolio because I can't just provide some URLs and say "I did that." So, in the interests of full disclosure I've included a little about my role in the project along with the screen shot and the URL. When working on a team, though, the result is always a product of team effort and I'd be arrogant to pretend that I'm solely responsible for anything on these projects.
Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilitieshttp://www.colemaninstitute.org The Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities is a privately-funded institute at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The current site is a massive revision of a site I originally did for them several years ago, and features conference proceedings (including embedded videos) and a custom bibliographic data base for researchers and care-providers. The institute insisted that their new site be certified by an independant agency to meet the highest standards of the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative. (The standards are WCAG 2.0, for those interested.) I'm proud to say the site was issued that certification by the Adaptive Technology Resource Center of the University of Totonto in January 2009. I did the entire site (minus content, of course) including HTML and CSS, a custom PHP templating system and a custom PHP database application, including content revisions to meet accessibility standards.
Machine Made Design(Hmmm, the site doesn't seem to be live anymore...) Designer Jeanne Mitchell wanted to showcase some recent work without using much text so we did her portfolio site as a single-page slide gallery. Jeanne, being a designer, did the design. I did the coding— HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, using the jQuery library. Jeanne and I collaborated earlier on a site for a government agency that never went live, which is mostly interesting because we've now completed two projects together without ever having met. (This hasn't been uploaded to the live server yet so the link is to the development site on my domain.)
Town of Erie, ColoradoThe same team built that did this built a site for the Town of Erie, Colorado a few years ago—this was an extensive revision of that site, updating the "look and feel" and keeping current with the town's branding, while taking advantage of some new features of the FarCry Content Management System and generally enriching the user experience. I designed the navigation and site structure (what's often called the "information architecture"), Daryl McCool did the graphic design. Cam Marshall managed the project, Bob McCool handled the client contact. A good crew to work with. The FarCry CMS was modified considerably in order to provide the user experience the town was trying to achieve, and quite a lot of widgetry created. The result delivers much more information, easier, to the residents of the town, and allows them to conduct some of their town- related business over the web site. This project also included a small eCommerce application, which required PHP, ColdFusion, and JavaScript working together, which was a little weird. The most fun was the AJAXy slide show and the National Weather Service weather widget.
High Plains Society for Applied AnthropologyThis project integrated parts of a legacy, Cold Fusion-based custom CMS with a new design and a Joomla! installation. Updating and maintaining the ancient Cold Fusion parts has been a chore, but the intention is to convert a secure members section in Joomla! when funds and attention allow and so to leave ColdFusion behind. My part was the Joomla! template and integration of the Cold Fusion stuff. The more I work with Joomla the more I like it, and it's now my standard enterprise-level CMS recommendation.
Reb Zalman Legacy ProjectSupporters and students of Rabbi Zalman wanted to archive the entire (large) body of his written work and make it available online. The project team extended the FarCry content management system to add an article archive and created a search utility for the archive. We then extended the cms again to create a separate site for a sister organization which could be maintained from the same administration panel. My part was to design the information structure, write the HTML and CSS templates and do the ColdFusion coding to extend the core CMS platform. These are wonderful people to work with, if you ever get the chance.
Boulder Arts ResourceAnother project that extended the FarCry CMS platform, this time to add a newsletter feature that replaced a printed version. This essentaily duplicated the functionality of an existing site, including a custom calendering application written in ColdFusion, and added a couple of new features. Wrapping that legacy application in the CMS with the same look and feel turned out to be difficult. Besided the HTML and CSS templates, I did an enormous amount of ColdFusion coding. It's probably useful, though embarassing, for you to know that this project didn't go very well. Not all of them do, for lots of reasons.
Boulder Community Hospital, Childbirth Educationhttp://www.bch.org/services/maternitycare.cfm/Childbirth%20Classes The hospital's website was done several years ago using a proprietary CMS written in ColdFusion by Bob McCool. In this project, we created new templates for the CMS for the design of the new section, acquired a proprietary class registration application written in ASP, and married the two together. It would be nice to say we integrated them, but that's not exactly the word for something more like a mash-up. It works pretty well, but is ugly under the hood. My part was the HTML and CSS and hacking the ASP and ColdFusion. This is the only time I have ever worked with the designer and he certainly did a good job capturing the right mood.
Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Non-violenceA group of us developed a FarCry website around a design that the client brought in. Although attractive, the design wasn't really finished and didn't accomodate all of the necessary features, so Daryl made quite a few changes. My part was developing the HTML and CSS mark-up and building the ColdFusion templates for the CMS. |
