Finished Another Site: OneCraneSource

December was quite a month, besides the obvious holiday celebration and preparations, I was also helping out my churches Arts Team and creating a Christmas set to remember. I also was able to finish up a clients website and also optimize the site for best search results, which all worked out beautifully ;)

The client was Star Crane, located in Allendale MI. And this job was a two part deal, first, fix their current mail forms that they had on their site, and second, build them a new site that will help them move into the year 2013, and also be flexible and secure, as well as help promote a better search result.

This site took me about 50 hours to complete from start to finish, and with three designs and four revisions, along with a mobile version to boot, that's not too bad. With that said though, this brings me to a place I'm all too familiar with, looking for more work ;) You can check out some of the screenshots of the design below, or you can head out to http://www.onecranesource.com and check it out for yourself.

Read More

Projects - Star Crane Mobile site design

Did some more work on the mobile app for Star Crane today. I was able to get it to finally show the Add to Home Screen pop up for mobile phones and tablets, and I also added a custom Icon and Start Screen for the web app too.

I wasn't happy with the menu design I was using to start with on this, so I decided to use the native UI controls so that it will appear smoothly on all mobile devices. I have some messing around to do in order to get the slides how's to show up right on the mobile side as well, but the good part of making the entire mobile app just a themed wrapper for the website makes upkeep on the app almost completely automated.

I like the direction this is moving, so I think I will keep it like this unless the client doesn't like it, then I may be able to change what they need, but for usability across the board, this is the way I feel it best presents it's self.

 

 

Read More

On to other things - new site design

So I have been working on a new project recently, and this one was a two part project. The first part was making sure that their current site has a working contact form. and the second part is redesigning a new look and feel on top of a Joomla site, so that they can expand in the future with components like an online storefront, or deeply integrate a social marketing campaign into their website.

I took a peek at their current site, and found out that the issues were with the current request mail form, which mind you is written in .PHP, which I kinda hate. I was able to fix the issue though, and got it working perfectly. I know its working perfectly, because the client is now getting SPAMBOT requests :) Too Funny!! But I have them covered already, because the first thing I implemented into the new request form on their new site was a ReCaptcha security method. This should stop the spam from coming through.

I then took my time and started working on a nice responsive theme, but wanted to keep it looking like it was more for their Corporate Office vs a large crane shop. I remade their logo based on some of the feedback they gave me and then used the main colors of their logo and equipment for the highlights of the site. I also used a simple menu system that will adjust to smaller mobile screens and provide a mobile dropdown menu in those cases. Overall, the site is pretty solid so far, with no real issues other than having to rebuild Apache with multibyte strings enabled.

My next stage of this process is to dismantle the site and modules I have now, and rebuild it with a darker, more progressive theme, and after that, another lighter theme, so once they choose from one of those, I will put it all back together with the look and feel of their choice, and then it goes live. I gave the client a timeframe of two months for the project, but the pace I am working, it may only take me three to four weeks, so that's a good thing ;)

Till next time, enjoy your adventures!

Read More

Revamping The Resume - Part 2 - Virtual Resume

One morning I was browsing my normal news sources when I came across Lifehacker's article about making a static resume and putting it on the web. I took that and ran with it over the last month in my spare time and came out with a good representation of my coding skills so far. Mix that with my Design abilities and I think I may have one of the key items I've been missing as a businessperson all along.

The site is 100% static HTML5 (CSS & JS) so it will run on 90% of the modern browsers out there. It uses a few types of animation too. One for the foreground and one for the background (which moves when the mouse moves, all 3D like). This is just version 1 of it so far, so I might have to revamp it a couple of times before I'm happy with it.

This is a link to my revamped resume jonwest.site44.com (mirror)

I plan on updating that as regularly as I remember, so leave a comment if you have any thoughts :)

Read More