Though I finished these three web design projects over the course of the last two months, current work has kept me too busy to add them to my portfolio — Until now. Florida Rip-Off Report, Little Coupon Books of America, and Connect with Scott have all been added to the Web Design section.
Florida Rip-Off Report
I was originally approached for this job by the owner, looking to be taught Flash to employ it himself for his website, back in early August. We got to talking, and what he really wanted was a simpler means of keeping his already-established localized consumer report forum moderated. As per his specifications, I built a lightweight and text-driven site that not only would feature its own custom Google search, but be highly visible to external web searches as well. The result was produced within a few weeks, and while less graphically-intensive than most, was one of my best deployments of clean and intelligent markup.
Little Coupon Books of America
The owner of the original The Little Coupon Book first e-mailed me via my Contact Page early in September, also wanting help with a Flash-based site and getting some pre-prepared content online. Being in the print business for some time, he was familiar with layouts and image editing, and had some spreads done to be interpreted and animated. Upon my advising, we scaled down the proposed use of Flash to a non-essential animation in the title/logo. I think Flash is capable of a lot, but trends in browsers and end-users tend to limit that potential severely. It’s still best to avoid using Flash where it could potentially hamper the user’s experience. Search engine visibility wasn’t much of an issue, and even with Flash for the headline and images in lieu of live text for much of the body copy, I was able to get the site up to the front page of results for some pointed Google searches. The main function of the site was to host a PayPal payment interface for the owners’ client base to make recurring payments more conveniently, and that mission was accomplished.
Connect with Scott
Scott is an established psychic from South Dakota. He had a web site set up already, but needed renovations and some new groundwork laid for future endeavors, and some better hosting. He moved to central Florida with his family not long ago and wanted someone local to get the job done, and he found me. I got started on his site first thing this month, and was done before the third week. Things got started off by switching from his old Web.Com hosting to the significantly more cost-efficient GoDaddy. I ripped out an old JavaScript-based menu system and replaced it with a visually identical one built on CSS site-wide, updated many pages of content, replaced some Flash and graphics, and ultimately did some intensive code-policing to facilitate future updates. Last but not least was getting his CGI/Perl-based mailing list system set up to work on the new server. All is well now and I’ll be working on his wife’s web site sometime in the next week or so.