larryaronson.com

I’ve been working with Michelle and Ariane Gold for about two years helping them maintain their website, ButchAndHarold.com. Michelle and Ariane market a line of peel-and-stick artware on their Yahoo Store-based website. Pretty nifty stuff. They have recently expanded their product line to include peel-and-stick photo frames and mini-stickers and, so, the website needed updating. New pages had to be created for the new products and their URLs had to be linked into the navigation menu. We decided to change the top level “Collection” menu button to “Shop” and make it a drop-menu showing the three product lines.

The BUTCH & harold website is a traditional HTML website. It’s nicely designed but unlike the blogs I’ve been working on recently, there are no templates or includes for global page elements. There are just a lot of HTML files. I didn’t build this site, but the Web designer/programmer who originally constructed it did a good job writing clean, modern code, making It easy to add content and make minor layout changes within the existing architecture. However, s/he did use some tricks with the navigation menu that gave me headaches trying to implement the drop-menu without rewriting the entire thing—and make it work in all browsers.

The remainder of this post is more technical. Skip it unless you’re really interested in how page navigation works. Or just visit the site and check out how I built the Stickr (frame) and Stickr (mini) pages. You’ll see (hopefully) some fun javascript in action.

Tom Watson’s “labor of love,” the New Critics blog, had been hacked and he had to bring it down.

I had just returned from my honeymoon and my home office had been in disarray for months. Helping Tom promised to be more fun than doing my taxes. It was. I like New Critics and regret that I haven’t had any time in this busy year to contribute.

Tom had built New Critics on an older version of Wordpress and needed to upgrade to prevent another hack. He wasn’t happy with his current hosting arrangement either and wanted to move the site to a hosting company with more services and better support.

US Tour Of Duty is a dot-org providing support for authors and speakers on the political left that oppose the Bush administration’s military adventurism in the Middle East. I was asked by their communication’s director, Jeff Norman, to consolidate two of their existing sites, USTourOfDuty.org and RealIntelligence.org, then, incorporating the same design, link in a new site, ScottRitter.us, devoted to the writing and appearances by Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector and author of several books on geopolitics.

Real Intelligence aggregates articles from other sources, including Scott Ritter’s site, ScottRitter.us. Using Wordpress custom fields, I gave Jeff the ability to post both “local” and “global” articles—which appear with their original bylines, publishing dates and permalinks.

This is also a rare case where the finished project reflects my visual design. The orginal site’s styles and graphics had little in common other than projecting a sense of patriotic investigative journalism. My client had no solid feelings on how the site should look and liked every choice I presented. I employed a red-white-and-blue color scheme with crisp lines and open fonts and reused the existing graphics as best as I could. I put in a lot more Photoshop hours on this project than I typically do.

Kevin Werbach was in trouble. He was coordinating activities for Supernova 2008 and had used a local connection (i.e. cheap labor) to redesign Conversation Hub, the conference’s weblog. The new design was good but it was executed with old technology that just didn’t integrate with Wordpress. Moreover, it was a cross-browser mess. Blogs do things differently than the webtools many designers are still using to create brochureware. They tend to use simple lists and rely on CSS for layout and positioning rather than nested tables. This makes for faster rendering, easier modifications and better search engine visibility.

Conversation Hub was also running on a very old version of Wordpress and needed an upgrade to take advantage of the newer editing and media management tools and plug-ins available. I was able to upgrade the site, lay in the design changes and install/configure the new plug-ins in plenty of time to meet the conference deadlines.

I’ve did three very different blogs for clients at the end of 2007.

East-West Dialogue – Under subcontract to graphics designer, Michael Pinto, of VM.com, I installed and configured this content management system for The East-West Center. It primarily serves as the online companion to the print version of the organization’s signature magazine, East-West Dialogue. The design requirements were very specific featuring a custom navigation menu and different sidebars for the index pages and post pages.

The Partnership For Prescription Assistance, Pennsylvania, blog. They client wanted a three column design with a Google Calendar. My favorite bit is the ShareThis wiggit attached to the end of each post.

Air Safety And Law is intended to serve as a forum for the legal community to discuss air travel safety and liability issues. I worked with my graphics designer friend, David Schiffer, who provided the header image and selected the theme from several sample templates I presented. This is a demo version on Wordpress.com which took me about an hour to create.

I’m the senior product developer for Smart Medical Consumer. Recently, I’ve adapted new styles and design elements from Advancity to unify and improve the site’s look and feel. I’ve also updated much of my perl cgi code making it more object oriented.

A lot of new features have been added to SmartMC including automatic alert messages with pop-up graphs that show how the the metics associated with one claim compare to other claims for the same patient, provider and insurance plan. The Edit interface has also been upgraded with AJAX driven drop-menus and auto-suggestion input fields.

Smart Medical Consumer

Smart Medical Consumer is a new Web-based service business conceived and designed by a remarkable person, Banu Özden, providing free health issue forums, resource directories, secure medical document storage and a sophisticated medical records manager.

I designed and programmed the records manager, MySMC, which was released this Spring in a limited, early beta version. MySMC is a LAMP application with HTML, CSS and AJAX, on the front, and a MySQL database with Perl CGI on the back. It manages health service provider invoices, insurance claim benefit statements and patient payment receipts.

MySMC features easy input and editing, strong searching and reporting, automatic error detections and comparison checks. Each registered MySMC user can define any number of patients making the system usable by individuals, families, organizations and companies.

Riverside Marketing Strategies

This is the website of a wonderful, online marketing consultant, Heidi Cohen. The design and layout was done by Michael Pinto of Very Memorable Media who provided a Photoshop file to work from. Ms. Cohen set precise standards for usability and searchability. The resulting collaboration resulted in a near perfect website.

Pass Open Records

This blog, subtitled: A Movement to Lift the Lid on Pennsylvania Government is an initiative of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association. I did the blog installation and configuration using WordPress, adapting and modifying a third party theme, Misty Look, under contract to Howard Greenstein who provided the association with the online strategy and training to make them bloggers. The project was conceived and designed by BravoGroup, a specialist in government communications.

I’ve known Howard since the early days of Silicon Alley. We’ve worked together on several dot-org projects and it was a pleasure to finally work with him, B2B, on a project.