The EastWestBest website was beginning to show its age when I was brought on. Tables were breaking, content was out of date, and the design was several years old. My task was to breath new life into the site and to make sure that it would remain useful for a long time.

…And Staying Fresh

The owners of Eastwestbest have other sites on the net and were concerned with making this site easy to update. With a product line of well over 300 items, they wanted to be able to update the site themselves. After weighing options, I installed WordPress, and with its easy backend interface the clients will be able to add, delete, and edit any products and categories for their site with a simple, straight-forward interface — including pictures.

The End Product

In addition to building this website, I was also contracted to do all the photography for the site as well. Over 100 products were photographed to create the product section of the site. All together, Eastwestbest underwent an incredible transformation, here are a few of the pages compared to their older counter part. (Click for large images.)

Homepage

Contact Page

Gallery Page

Special Orders Page

• Live Site
• Screen Shot

Unhappy with the lack of funding from San Francisco, Defender of Dogs was started with the goal of making dog parks in S.F. more accessible, cleaner, and overall better places for people to take their loved companions.

Raising Awareness, Raising Money

Defender of Dogs wanted to be able to use their website to increase awareness of their cause, and raise funds for improving dog parks. Fortuneately, they were ready with a product line of clothing for you and your dog. By creating a friendly product database that had a tight integration with PayPal Defender of Dogs is set up to offer a wide range of products that can be updated on a whim.

Part of the Community

Defender of Dogs wanted to provide people with something they could use, something helpful. So, the “Find a park” feature was created. As the section title implies, you can use the website to find dog parks in San Francisco and get a slew of information about each ranging from what facilities the park has to what is near the park.

• Live Site
• Screen Shot

Goodomen.net was originally created in 2000 and I was hired to redesign this web site in 2004. Since its creation, the site was passed between no less than 4 designers and the chaos that ensued was blatantly obvious. The site was a mess: broken links, failing table-based templates, order forms mal-functioning, and a lack of coherent branding. My task was to turn this around.

The process

The first thing I did for this project was sit down and spend a long time with the previous site. Seeing past its faults, I was looking for the content, the structure, and what was important for the artist to show on his site. Doing this allowed me to redesign the sites information architecture into something more accessible and user friendly.

When that process was finished and I had a basic outline of the site, I went to the design phase. At this time I received the client’s CDs for sampling and found inspiration for the site from his music and his album covers. Moving forward I applied this layout to the site. You can see just how much of a change it was. (Click for large images.)

Homepage

“Blue World Order” Album Info Page

“Cubacambio” Album Info Page

To spiff up the site a bit, I programmed and added an XML based Flash MP3 player to the site. The same flash file is used across each album page to serve different play lists, thus providing less download and better recognition. In addition, it can create a pop-up window to play while you browse.

The last step was streamlining the ordering process. Moving away from a simple form with tons of instructions, the new ordering system will heed which payment selection you choose and respond to your order accordingly. Doing so will reduce the number of incomplete orders and save the client time.

• Live Site
• Screen Shot

The Tenderloin Futures Collaborative is a group of individuals who meet monthly to talk about the Tenderloin community, local events, and to discuss the future. TLFutures was looking for a way to keep their communication channel running throughout the month in a quick and easy way. Document hosting, note storage, and persistant discussion areas were key to this website.

Keeping it Fresh

The key element behind this website is that it be easy to update for the group. Moving along these lines I built the site to run off a popular, opensource package called WordPress. Utilizing this very versatile package, the entire website can be updated in a quick and extremely easy manner without worry of breaking anything.

Community Matters

The other main aspect of this website was that the group wanted a place to have persistent discussions on various topics. This called for a forum space. By using the highly customizable phpBB system, I was able to quickly and cleanly incorporate the site design with a powerful and flexible forum software.

• Live Site
• Screen Shot

Alpha Kappa Psi, a business sorority at University of San Diego, needed a new website and they had a quick approaching deadline to meet. Contacting me on the 19th of January, I was able to redesign and reprogram their site by the 2nd of February — roughly two weeks from contact to completion.

No simple task

This wasn’t a quick hack job either. The Alpha Kappa Psi web site features an integrated MySQL calendar, live stock quotes, and easy to update pages. Stuff all that inside a compliant XHTML/CSS design and you have one awesome site:

“You’re been very quick, accurate, and everything looks amazing!”
- Lindsey Rittenhouse

• Live Site Under new design
• Screen Shot

I’ve always enjoyed programming in Flash, and there’s no better reward then getting to play your own games – and seeing other people enjoy them too. This series of 5 flash games was developed over a 3 month period. After completing the games, I have released them under a Creative Commons license.

What kind of fun is this?

This set of games includes great titles like Flight, KarDahdge, Ship, BouncyBall, and QuickQonnect. Each game has a different goal (avoid the walls, dodge asteroids, or solve a puzzle). The inspiration for these games came from my group of friends who were crying out for something do to during those long boring classes at school.

• Live Site
• Screen Shot

Based on an idea from a Photoshop action I created, I designed this PHP script to parse an image, take random samples from it, and generate a color palette. The results are vary from image to image however, certain pictures will return better results. Made over with JavaScript and CSS this proves to be a simple and powerful tool.

Overview

By splitting the image into different sections and sampling from each section, the script will grab an average snapshot of the image and infer a color scheme. This is technique will be used in a future project that will allow you to apply an “image-based theme” to a web site.

• Live Site
• Screen Shot

I put together a site for my roommates so that we could have a nice little corner of the web for ourselves. These are some of the people I’ve roomed with during college and become great friends with.

Special Attention

I put a lot of work into this blog — it was my first under the WordPress bloging software, so it took a lot of effort. I made custom pages for the categories, the authors, and even the home page is wickedly customized. I had a lot of input and help from the authors and a really good time putting this together and maintaining it.

• Live Site no longer active
• Screen Shot