Web Design, Drupal, Portfolio

It seems like every new site I build, there is a need to pull another node in via Ajax. This can be done with the lightbox overlay or by emptying a div and refilling it with another node.

The Foundation is new fitness revolution started by Peter Park and Eric Goodman. The site and design needed to be ready for growth and viewable on mobile phones. We figured out a pretty cool jQuery trick to swap the sites custom flash player to iPhone formatted video files. Pretty cool trick that works great. We used Drupal 6 to allow for easy growth.

FoundationRoots.com

Noxcuses Fitness site was a ground up redesign. The old site had poor search rankings and was not editable by the client. We rebuilt the site with a fresh new look to coincide with their expansion in to a new facility. The site today is updated by the staff and has a new blog and newsletter in the works.

Noxcusesfitness.com

ShadowScreen Productions is a media rich site built on Drupal 6. This was fun project to convert their aging non flexible flash based site in to easy to manage, search friendly Drupal site. We spent a lot of time researching how to stream the best quality video on a small business budget. We ended up building a custom flash player and streaming the files from Mosso's content delivery network (CDN). The site heavily uses CCK, node reference to tie clip nodes to directors and films. Using jQuery's easy AJAX functions I was able to dynamically load clips in to the page while maintaining the link for search engines.

ShadowScreenProductions.com

I have been a full time Web Designer / Developer at concur for the past two years. Upon starting I built out a Drupal based site infrastructure for all our marketing sites. After we got all the sites moved in to a CMS (Drupal 5) content management became so much easier for our team to delegate. We now have over 20 localized sites running on Drupal. The Concur sites have been constantly evolving to improve user experience and to stay fresh.

Concur.com

YogaPeeps.com, built with wordpress. Podcast feed is picked up by itunes and media is served by Libsyn. This site is a few years old and still kicking.

YogaPeeps.com

I have been playing around with Ruby on Rails for the past week.

Everything is so different than Drupal which I have been working with over the past year.  It seems like I spend so much time hacking away at Drupal to properly display my output in a themable manner. Drupal 6 is better but still a bit grey as far as documentation is concerned.

Here is how I would some up the two:
Drupal = a over grown Bonsai Bush that you have to hack down to size.

Ruby on Rails =  a sparse tree that you only grow the leaves you need.

I am not much of a facebook user but am totally impressed after downloading the app. Facebook has made it so easy to add photos, find out what your friends are doing and chat. Native iphone apps are key because the UI stays on the phone rather than having to be rendered in the browser. Native apps also give you access to the camera and gps which allows for even more functionality.

Wordpress has a cool blogging app also. It allows you to quickly blog photos on the run etc.

I am typing this on my iphone but Drupal does not have a native app. Using the xmlrpc api it should be pretty simple to code one. Adding content to drupal from the iphone is not that easy. I had to create a new mobile user then switched the theme for that user. This allowed me to lighten up the UI and provide just the links that I will actually use. I have also formatted the node form fields to fit the browser width.