My good friends Julius & Kristen are tying the knot this September and they needed an RSVP/Wedding Website for their guests to easily get information about the big day. I was happy to assist them in building an easy to update site based on a design they provided.

I took the background provided in the design and made it stretch to the full width of the site regardless of browser or device resolution. I even took the time to make sure everything was looking good on iPads, iPhones, and other mobile devices. Even though each page’s content is displayed with a fadein effect, I made sure that users without Javascript would be able to see all the content with no issues. The pages simply become 1 page with the navigation anchoring down to the different sections.

The other feature built into the site that I’m very happy with is the ability to use the user’s current location to obtain directions to the wedding without typing in any address information (if their browser supports it). The user will be prompted upon visiting the site if they would like to allow their device’s current location to be used. If they do, clicking a link will open up Maps or Google Maps and display directions from where ever they are.

Congratulations, Julius & Kristen!

While we are on the subject of Weddings…

I’d like to also take up some space here to congratulate another duo who I am happy to also call my good friends. Matthew & Sabah will be getting married a week earlier. I did not work on their Wedding site as Matthew is also a very talented Web Developer but I figured since their weddings are back to back weekends, it was an appropriate place to give them a nod and congratulations.

Congratulations, Matthew & Sabah!

I’ve been real busy this past year. Check out Julius Reeves Photography, Titan Street (Mike Stein), Goodwin Design Group, Love The Squalor, Fifth Pocket Design, Lookout for the Cookout, City Kitties & Awesome Dudes Printing to see a little bit of what I’ve been up to.

These are just some of the sites I’ve worked on over the past year. I hope to refresh this whole portfolio soon, but in the meantime I’ll be trying out some new themes and migrating my portfolio to a custom post type instead of nested pages. The first theme I’ll be trying out (and likely modifying as I go) is the Constellation Theme. It seems like a good base theme to get started with.

My skate site, haveboard.com had not seen a redesign since 2006 so I put things in gear and got a new custom WordPress theme with a lot of new plugins in effect. I wrote about it here as well as in my featured work section.

I recently had the pleasure to work with Jetty Clothing on their website. They already had a site built on top of WordPress but they wanted to do a little more as well as have some freedom to updating their homepage.

I had the pleasure of working with Nick Zegel on this project. Read about the project here or check out JettyLife.com.

On December 8, 2009 ucpgg.org was relaunched with a new website in collaboration with the Wildfire Agency, Damien DeChurch, and myself.The old site needed a lot of work as you can see above. A CMS was built using WordPress for this project with a lot of heavy customization and the help of various plugins.

They also required a user forum, which I utilized Vanilla Forums and built a custom theme for that as well, to match the look of the site.

I particularly liked the WordPress Custom Admin Branding Plugin. Clients can tend to think that WordPress is just a blogging platform so it helps to apply the Client’s logo to the Admin section of WordPress and this plugin does just that, with a few edits to their template files.

Last week Meljoy.com launched and I’m quite happy with the outcome. It was my first venture into using wordpress for a client’s portfolio site. The thumbnails on the right hand site are her Work, and the left shows the blog as well as the detail view of the Work section.

This site is hosted on godaddy on a windows server. It is also an aliased domain. This became a major hurdle when I moved the site from the development environment to the the production server. I had to disable clean URLs in wordpress, and because it is an aliased domain, the site pages, although at root level have to show the name of the aliased directory along with the domain name like this: http://meljoy.com/meljoy/?p=590. I wasn’t particularly happy with this for many reasons, including SEO. I believe you can get clean URLs working on a godaddy windows server, but it no simple task, and I regretfully could not spend any more time on it. My experience is more on the Linux Server side of things, so it is always an interesting task when a client has a windows server. Maybe next time I’ll dive in and get that working, godaddy.

Have a look and check out all the amazing stuff that Melanie does. Feedback Is definitely welcome.