Blasi Blah

Today I woke up to check the sites I worked on that I was getting ready to submit to a few awards and when I got to PlayPumps.org I at first thought something happened to the DNS or the site template on Backbaud Sphere (Kintera Sphere) only to finally find out they did it on purpose.

Here is the site Before (left) & After (right):

PlayPumps.org was the main site for PlayPumps International, with the primary portion of the site hosted on Kintera Sphere (now Blackbaud Sphere) which manages all of their online forms, donation and constituency as well as most of their content web pages.

The blog, gallery, and the videos were all managed on a sub domain blog.playpumps.org which was running an instance of WordPress which I had customized while working for Changing Our World Inc.

The blog functioned straight forward like a blog, that is the main tool in WordPress anyway so the only change there was to styling and layout. For the gallery the Flickr API was used to create a custom layout and pull in all of the photos, comments and tags used on Flickr. The images could then link to a larger version in a light box or to the original image in Flickr whichever they decided. The video was all YouTube based, so using their API I pulled in all of the information you could see or want from YouTube including the video, rating, YouTube link, embed code for the video and the description used on YouTube for the video.

On the PlayPumps homepage there was a nice flash element that rotated through 4 tabs which could have their text and content changed via an XML document on the server. This means by editing a single XML file they can change the text on the tabs, the link to the button and the url for the image. Also in the flash was a sample pump, basically it was the pump on the left with a water tower on the right, the tower filling based on a value in the XML file to the level of donations received.

In the end this is all gone, and what is going on no one knows. There has been no outward communication from PlayPumps or parent Case Foundation about the changes happening at PlayPumps International. The only news is that they are investing in Water for People (waterforpeople.org).

After all of the brainstorming, strategies, suggestions and helping hands held out to them, it has all be denied. Anyway, it seems my hopes for this organization are falling away faster and faster…

I just did a new design for Prospect Blue, this design was for their client Joe L’Erario who is a well know figure on TV and wood projects.  He is having a new site designed to feature his books, projects and show appearances.

The site is being built by Prospect Blue’s developers and should be live soon.  I really can’t wait to see it in action.  Along with the design I also helped Prospect Blue in the development of a strategy for building the site’s membership, and ultimately monetizing the site an it’s content.

My design for East Coast Racer has been featured on We Love Wordpress which is kind of cool. I always like to hear that people appreciate my work, who doesn’t. You can see the page it is featured on here please check it out and rate it for me, and feel free to leave a few comments with your thoughts on the site as well.

This was a concept design I did mainly because I was not happy with what they had online. Basically I was inspired to do this design after looking at the site they currently had up for the event which was just in my opinion very bad. The navigation was hard to manage through and it did not have the fun factor of the event.

The idea behind this design is that the top section where you see 2 large F-15s would rotate through the use of a jquery to fade between different aircraft flying over the top of the site. The top navigation would have drop down menus for the dub navigation items, and on interior pages the sub navigation would sit on the left sidebar pushing the logo images down.

They had no video content and very little in the way of photo content so I though it would also be nice to incorporate a nice video of what goes on at the show to promote it just a bit more.

The design is still very basic but cleaner and brighter which I think makes it easier to follow and a little more fun.

Cavallo Customizing is a site I came up with and at some point will build to be an online store for Mustang and other Ford powered vehicles. It is really just something more to feed my hobby of building and racing cars. My intention is to build the site out on WordPress and use the WP-Ecommerce plugin to power the store, and use Google Checkout and PayPal as payment gateways. I have the site sliced into a compliant HTML | CSS layout, all that is left is to set it up with the system and get a few suppliers (easier said than done I’m afraid).

It is a fairly simple and straight forward design in which there are no fancy background or anything. On the homepage the large image would rotate through 3 – 4 features but on interior pages it would be a static category specific image. The products would all have their categories as seen to the right column and really I think everything was left simple enough that it is pretty self explanatory.