Benefits for the Client

Mondo Design Upgrade. CaliforniaWild.org was sorely in need of a design overhaul, from graphics to UI.  The site hadn’t received any deisgn love since before the millennium, so we had a blank canvas - daunting and exciting.  Project Manager and driving force behind the new site, Sam Goldman, hunted down an SF local (and friend of his) to lead us into visual completitude.  Jonathan’s Motzkin’s design was perfect - simple, clean, and inviting.  And a fabulous use of whitespace! - you can tell even from his personal home page that the guy has a talent for (blank) space.  Designers who aren’t afraid to flirt with blank space are my kind of designers.

Drupalize It. Sam wanted a community/outreach site, partially community-driven (forums), with a blog and a user-friendly content management system.  And of course, a totally customizable look&feel.  Drupal was a good fit, as it provides

1. Native forums and blogging
2. Scalable community features through the extensive repository of third-party modules
3. Content creation and editing is pretty good as far as free open-source CMS’s go
4. Motzkin’s design also called for multiple menus - also no problem for Drupal
5. Because of it’s open architecture, modding look&feel is just a bit of html/css wizardry (actually, more than a bit - Drupal is crazy with them IDs and classes!)

Benefits for the Client

Professional, clean, handsome design. The collaborative effort between Joe and I resulted in what I think is a polished, efficient UI, and branding that captures the double-edged nature of cause marketing. I only wish I had the illustrative chops of the WSJ to come up with this (sent to me by Joe after we launched).

Wordpress-fu. Now at version 2.5, WP is probably one of the the most user-friendly and powerful CMS options available, giving Joe total user control managing site content. And at no cost, we immediately reduced Joe’s monthly bills - Typepad, while cheap, ain’t free.

World wide domination. Wordpress is flexible for now and then. Tyepad is full service and handles all the basics of blogging, but it can’t match WP’s open source technology and community plugin development that allowed SelfishGiving to enjoy a fully customized look&feel and UI, premier social bookmarking capability, and extended room for growth - Joe needed a site that could accommodate the potential for the blog to mature into a full-featured community portal.

Sean Stannard-Stockton became a big Wordpress fan after we transitioned his blog Tactical Philanthropy from Typepad. He was so impressed he decided to migrate his company’s site from Joomla after being fed up with a “less intuitive” content management platform. A little CSS-fu and the site template was migrated successfully, retaining near-exact graphical layout to the Joomla version.

Benefits for the Client

Increased ease of use by switching to more appropriate, and familiar, content management system (CMS).

Enhanced search engine optimization (SEO) by replacing image-based design with text links.

Responsibilities on this project

Joomla development

iJoomla implementation

information architecture

For over a year now I’ve been working with the ID Project out of New York City on their online publication, Sentient City Magazine. The second addition just went live - big smile on the completion since all-volunteer projects can be hard to mitigate time/patience/energy, particularly when I break my arm half way through.

Surprisingly, while working on the zine I found myself really liking Joomla again. Previously, I felt like Drupal and Wordpress were moving faster forward as the addon collection for these systems grew and Joomla’s lag with their version 1.5 seemed endless. Further, and most importantly for the myriad demands of clients and partners: Joomla’s plugin directory was unreliable to find solutions. This is still one of my main concerns, but Joomla’s core is still great to work with, particularly the module system, once you get the hang of it.

Responsibilities on this project

CSS/XHTML template development

web standards consulting

Whipped this bad boy out in a long day’s work on short notice. Well…a weency bit of debug time added later because IE7 was not playing nice with my Sons of Suckerfish. On this project I was challenged to try my hand at a fluid width layout for the first time. (Just hadn’t had the opportunity before in my young carreer.) The design mockups from Quicksilver were fashioned at 1280px wide, which is not going to fit on the commonly sized 1024px screen resolution. In the end, I’m pretty happy with the websmithery - the layout degrades pretty nicely as you fold the browser window. Thanks for the call, Adam!

Responsibilities on this project

information architecture

graphic design

user interface design

Wordpress configuration and template development

Wordpress consulting

job board template and configuration

What an honor and privilege to work with Sean Stannard-Stockton of Ensemble Capital Management on the Tactical Philanthropy blog redesign. It’s these types of projects that make work feel like living. Work is joy, learning, growth, and relationship.

Growth: Never trained in graphic design, I was challenged to come up with a user interface and look&feel for a blog that must be professional yet trancendent, warm yet not too fuzzy, all about money yet triple bottom line. In the process I pushed my talents forward, resurrecting years of past artistic training. An interesting revelation was discovering that I felt more confident as user interface designer, rather than branding, logo, marketing type.

Learning: The major technical objective was to move a year-old Typepad blog into Wordpress. This conquest is relatively painless using WP’s native import feature, which deftly converts all your post headings and comment permalinks. The only catch is getting old TP permalinks within the posts themselves to behave. TP has a wack permalink structure that truncates the post slug at 15 characters - something that WP permalink settings can’t grok. Unfortunately, most of the literature online only deals with forcing WP to match TP’s perma-style. But I wanted to do the reverse. Thanks to Colin Brumelle and Ivan Storck of Citizen Space for the expert support.

The simplest solution, whiched I eventually opted for, was doing a little rule-based black magic to force redirects from each old link to each new. Before this project I had barely touched the oft invisible .htaccess file - now she’s an old friend. Another possibility, unattainable at my level of programming skill, would have been to generate a php script that could do a redirect redirect by hunting the WP database for a closest match based on the “15 characters.”

Fun:

Responsibilities on this project:

CSS/XHTML template development

web standards consulting

Wordpress configuration and template development

Wordpress consulting