The owners are really good friends of mine, and we have been working on this site for awhile.  We designed all of the pages of the site to match the look of some of their favorite album covers.  There is a lot of image replacement that occurs on the site to match the album design, while still allowing indexable content for search engines and screen readers.

I am really happy with how the site came out and its character helps to accentuate the business that Dave and Juniper have created over the past 7 years.

The project was based around design, ease of use, and trying to get rid of the stigma that e-learning has to be the same old boring thing.

My role was to create the entire application from scratch, using only still photo mock-ups. This involved chopping out the assets, integrating them into Flash or HTML, adding appropriate animations, and tweaking the design as functionality and usability were introduced… and that’s just to get the artwork into the project.

• I built the application with a PHP and MySQL backend to handle all of the server side functionality.
• There is a CRON job that calculates client statistics every few hours so we have an idea of how the system is being operated.
• There is a PHP class for dynamically developing PDF files for course certificates which I integrated into the system.
• System alerts are delivered using jQuery in a Growl-like fashion.
• Part of the admins side is a Flex-based application for creating quiz pools, including picture uploads, that can be randomly drawn from during quizzes on the user side.

The project was a great learning experience and helped solidify larger project ideals, such as how to handle continued feature and support requests, how to take a project from design to web, and how to best manage the available resources for the project.

Since I haven’t been keeping the site up to date as much as I should have I now redirect traffic to jonknapp.com.

After meeting with them in person and collecting all of their pictures and print assets, I came up with a mock-up design that they liked. Soon I had their entire site designed with updated pictures and a good HTML/CSS design combo. I also implemented a random testimonial that pulls from a collection on the server and an embedded Google map of their location on their contact page.

To allow them to manage their content and images on their own, I created the site using WordPress. By working closely with the client, I was able to find a theme that resembled the design they were looking for, then modified it to meet their needs.

The main feature of the site is the ability for clients to easily browse the available design patterns and choose a custom engraving design form the comfort of their home.

Instead of having to learn how to create an application for displaying video files natively on the iPhone, I used a JavaScript/CSS model for creating an experience that mimics the iPhone’s controls.

The project link is to a backup of the site since we didn’t plan on keeping the mobile portfolio up to date in the long run.

The initial video shown when you first visit the site is a Flash SWF that is loaded in by Flex, but is able to be controlled by Flex through a class interface. That way, I can tell the piece to stop playing and restart if the user decides to go to another portion of the site.

The pictures for each of the items on the site are only loaded in when they are to the left or right of the current piece. That way images are requested as needed instead of being embedded into the Flex application (which bloats the filesize) or being requested as soon as the application starts (which slows down the user’s bandwidth of the current piece).

The project link is to a backed up version of the site, since Expand didn’t end up going in this direction.