One down, three to go!

Dadds.com site design and update

The site I have been poring my hard work into lately is finally finished. And by the time this post goes live, the site will be live as well hopefully. The biggest part of this project was taking all the old info and updating it for newer devices and services. I implemented a payment portal, HTML5 slideshow, a kick butt content editor, and a couple easy ways to incorporate videos and slideshows easily. So let's start with a small before and after of the website. 

Home page

Here is the old homepage layout for Dadds.com 

And here is the new layout. We have minimized the focus on the page to the opening article, and replaced all the various banners and text info with a few dynamic modules that will automatically adjust to the article size. 

Limo-bus 25 page

Here is a sample of one of the pages on the old dadds.com. This page is about one of their limo-buses. The actual info did not start until you scrolled down a couple pages worth. 

This was fixed with the new design. All of the slides/pictures are contained in a basic slider that scrolls by its self every few seconds. 

Wedding Services Page

With this page, it was the same as all the others, laid out for one screen size, Gallery and videos took up most of the page, and the content was taking up a small part of it. 

With the slideshow implemented, and the modules around the content, we can see a good portion of the content right off the bat. This is a good thing here. 

Other Examples

Here are a few more examples for how the site looks now with a large resolution screen. This is how it would appear on 60% of the computers viewing it.

Mobile Phone Layout

Here are a few screens for how the site layout adjusts for mobile devices. These are what the view on a basic iPhone will look like. The only thing I'm not happy with on this view is that the pictures are still using a 650 width. If I use 100%, I get a slideshow the width of one row/module. So it is one or the other here :)

Mobile Tablet Layouts

When you view the site from a tablet, the format also shifts and you get a couple different content sizes depending on if the site is viewed in landscape or portrait mode. 

Read More

Web Work So Far

Over the weekend, I was able to find a couple opportunities for web design and maintenance locally, so that was just awesome. I was also able to start working on ClientX's first website today, and although I got off to a rough start, I quickly got my bearings with the ancient art of PHP and Smarty templates, and got through 3/4 of their requests for the week. That was just my first day working on it too, so you could say that I had a rather productive day. One thing I do to help my productivity while I'm working from home is to set a single tone reminder to go off every 30 minutes. As I'm working, I will let it go through one or two dings before I get up and take a break for a bit. This also helps me stay on task when I'm away from my work, reminding me that I have to get back to it soon.

With this client, I am dropping a whole lot of hints to move towards a better CMS, instead of the custom made one they are using. I can imagine that they have spent thousands of dollars in the past per update because each time they want to add a new function, they have to hire a coder to code that function. Why? There is a whole world of components for systems like Joomla out there that are cheap to implement. That would save the client thousands of dollars over the next few years. Heck! They could even do most of this work themselves if they went that route.

 Another thing I'm kind of liking about this job, is that my contract reserves me the rights to blog my work, and even gives me the rights to all of my code too. This way I can share it if I want to. If I ever figure out how to implement a drop-down menu into this ancient system, I do plan on sharing the menu-box.tpl file. It's been a tough one so far, so I can't be the only one looking for a solution.

 That's about it for today. Things are moving, just have to wait for the road to go up the hill :)

Read More