08/21/06
Project Description:
My fiance is a second grade teacher and has an amazing gift of coming up with ideas for her classroom that make teaching more effective and fun. I convinced her to share these ideas with the rest of the world by starting her own blog. I then put together a layout and design that fit her target audience (female teachers of primary and elementary grades). The main image of the female teacher at the top of the page is a stock illustration from iStock. I used it to somewhat keep a theme throughout the site with the colors and graphics. As for the logo…who says Comic Sans doesn’t work well any more?!
To make sure she got something in return for her hard work, I monetized the site with Google AdSense and a handful of relevant affiliate links.
The site is optimized for search engine traffic with dynamic page titles, descriptions, keyword, header tags, and more. Each article is written with keyword research to find the best words and phrases to use for optimum search engine traffic. The extra 10 minutes spent doing keyword research for each article has helped tremendously. I’m starting to think I’ve created a monster…not the site…HER!
Project Details:
My Teaching Ideas was created with the following:
- Wordpress 2
- Adobe Photoshop
- iStock Royalty Free Illustrations
- Google AdSense
- Commission Junction
- EditPlus
- CSS, ASP, Access
Site Address:
Launched:
08/9/06
Project Description:
My fourth project for the Fee / Hedrick Family Entertainment Group was to redesign the website for The Blackwoods who host the Blackwood Breakfast Variety Show at The Black Bear Jamboree Theater. Their original site (seen in the before and after link below) was fairly modest and in need of an update to go with their current image. They had new photos, marketing material, press releases, etc that they wanted to get online and needed a dynamic website that could provide that.
I turned to Wordpress to base the content management system on so they could post current news and press releases with ease. I then started with the excellent K2 theme for Wordpress and designed a scheme for it that matched the Blackwood’s current marketing material.
The new site features:
- More color
- Flash slideshow on the first page (static images on the rest)
- Five latest news storied on front page
- Dynamic list of their upcoming shows (driven by a simple text file…big thanks to Christopher Bourque of XK3 Media for hooking me up with the script that does this)
- 30 second commercial embedded as a Flash file on their Breakfast Show page
- Tons more search engine optimization, which is already bringing so much more traffic to the site
Click here to see the before and after screenshots.
Project Details:
The Blackwoods was created with the following:
- Wordpress 2
- K2 Theme
- Adobe Photoshop
- Flash 8
- EditPlus
- CSS, ASP, Access
Site Address:
Launched:
08/2/06
Project Description:
I was planning to propose to my (then) girlfriend on December 24, 2005 and found myself going through quite a bit of steps to make it all come together. To somewhat journal it all, I created a website where I kept track of everything that I was going through such as buying the ring, making a photo book, asking for her parents’ blessing, etc. It quickly became “part of” the proposal.
Some people may wonder why I have a “personal site” in my portfolio. Well, let me count the ways:
- This was my first site based on Wordpress, so it contained tons of “experiments”
- The site is smoothly coded in XHTML & CSS
- It validates
- It’s driven by PHP & mySQL
- It’s search engine friendly
- It’s cross-platform and cross-browser compatible
- It contains AJAX
- It contains a Flickr API to show the latest 4 photos of Crystal and me
- It’s ranked in the top 1% of websites on the web according to Alexa
- I created customized CSS to give Crystal’s posts a different colored text than my own
- More CSS is combined with Flash to give the titles of our posts unique fonts
- Even more customized CSS and PHP shows our pictures beside our posts for easy reference
Project Details:
Crystal and Shane was created with the following:
- Wordpress
- K2 Theme for Wordpress
- EditPlus 2
- Adobe Photoshop
- Flash MP3 Player
- Canon Digital Rebel
- XHTML, CSS, PHP, mySQL
Site Address:
Launched:
Shane Eubanks
