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.

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.

Here are some of the sites I’ve designed and built for clients in the commercial and fine arts. I offer them as examples of the simple, static, Web 1.0 sites, done very quickly for friends a few years ago. Today it’s much easier and more effective to establish an online presence using Web 2.0 tools and social media services.

Suzearts is the online showcase for my best friend, Susan Thornton, who creates wonderful images from the land and sky scapes of New Mexico and Fire Island. We put this simple site together in an afternoon several years ago for the New York Licensing show. Today, you can do a lot more to showcase art and music by using services such as flickr and photobucket, to organize and tag your art, and social media services like Facebook and Twitter to promote your work across a web of networks, groups and friends.

Mick Kolodgy Fine Art

is an online gallery of his paintings. I developed the horizontal gallery design with rollover menus at both ends and tied it all together with a compact image caching and navigation scheme written in Javascript. This was fun to build but I can’t advise artists that having your own showcase site is the best way to leverage the Web anymore. There are many web services companies that want and need your content; provide a wide range of options for organizing, displaying and selling it; can boost your search engine juices and connect you to networks, groups and forums of people interested in what you do.

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.