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:
08/2/06
Project Description:
My third project for the Fee / Hedrick Family Entertainment Group was to redesign the website for The Comedy Barn Theater. The old site was fairly simply, full of unnecessary spacer gifs, lacked alt & image tags, used images for plain text, and was just all-around an SEO turtle. It needed a bit more character, cleaned up, and tweaked for search engines.
I have to admit that this is the last site with tables that I have created. I have since moved to using solid XHTML and CSS based layouts. Even with tables, I managed to do away with the spacer gifs and cleaned the code up substantially. The first thing that I dis was add color to the design. The background is now blue and the top is a bright red barn roof with a Flash animation of the logo and the characters that pop up beside it. It creates an immediate “fun” emotion when opening the site.
Other changes are:
- The menu was cleaned up with sharper rollover images and text
- The paragraphs of text are no long images. This allows search engines to see the keywords
- Links to other shows & theaters were added to provide cross-linking strength
- 30 second commercial added in Flash format
- Online ticketing integrated (Online ticketing was not created by me. I had practically no control over the functionality and a lot of the user interface. I just linked to it and tried to make its pages look the same as the rest of the site.)
Click here to see the before and after screenshots.
Project Details:
The Comedy Barn was created with the following:
- Macromedia Dreamweaver
- Adobe Photoshop
- Flash 8
- EditPlus
- CSS, ASP, Access
Site Address:
Launched:
Shane Eubanks
