Websites
Here’s a representative sampling of websites I’ve built or worked on before I started doing all this WordPress stuff. Bear in mind that, with the exception of a couple of architectural drawing classes, I’ve had no formal graphic arts training. I’m an Information Architect and an author with a talent for bringing clarity to complex topics.
I tell you this because we can’t help but make judgments based on how something looks. First impressions do count and this page would be incredibly lame without the screen shots. I know how to organize and present information on a screen. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last few decades in collaboration with clients, graphic designers and business analysts. I encourage you to look beyond the screen shots, visit a site and get the feel of the place.
More recent examples can be found in my blog posts.
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.
The Adventures of Baby Cat in Cherry Grove
The website to promote a childrens’ book by Susan Thornton and Tim Steffen. Susan is one of my oldest friends and a terrific artist/illustrator. This is the imagined adventures of her cat, Lily, in the wilds of Cherry Grove, the beach community where Susan spends much of the year painting and gardening.
I designed and built the site from the sketches and notes Susan and Tim provided. It’s a simple site of a half dozen pages: excerpts, order page, an original song, author bios, etc. The navigation features cute paw-overs and text highlighting. There’s a link to the Baby Cat Blog and announcements of the upcoming publication of Baby-Cat 2.
Bitter End Yacht Club
My favorite vacation spot was in trouble. The design firm that was doing their Website was overbudget and way late — the Webspace was a mess. Working closely with the client, I moved the Webspace to a new host, cleaned up the navigational interface and re-organized the content, adding in a lot of new images from their PhotoCDs. The Background images, page head and logo, are from the original unfinishd site, everything else, including the navigation rollovers, is my work.
Skies of NYC
Tommy Flynn is a professional photographer and he lives in TriBeCa on Lipsenard street. He had a terrific view of the World Trade Center towers and took thousands of shots over the years. He’s publishing the best 36 images — lightning strikes, green sunsets; an amazing collection — in several formats via this Website. Someone had created the main pages establishing the basic design but it was over structured (too many tables) and would break in certain browsers. I simplified the HTML, added JavaScript rollovers for the buttons and built the poster ordering pages incorporating a simple ecommerce solution using PayPal.
Sliced Open
Here’s another Tommy Flynn website. He loves cooking and shopping in Manhattan’s downtown markets and is publishing a book of fruit and vegetable photographs. The concept is selection and immediacy. The object is ritually sliced and photographed quickly. We couldn’t compromise on the image quality so I devised an image preload and caching scheme to make the site load as fast as possible. The circle in a square design concept is mine. There’s a lot of javascript in this site to generate indexes and power the navigation.
Spiti.Org
The Spiti valley is way high in the himalayas on the disputed border of India and China. Largely ignored until the mid-nineties, the fragile Tibetan culture of the inhabitants are threatened by poverty and the harsh but beautiful environment. I built this Website for a UK-based charity that’s building clinics, organizing craft cooperatives and restoring a temple. The job here was to assemble content from their newsletters and photo CDs to tell their story. There’s no special technology here, just nice people doing good works.
Goldheart Pictures
Goldheart Pictures is a small, independent, movie production company. I built this Website based on the client’s design to showcase their current and upcoming productions. The emphasis here is on images and a large part of the work went into processing the posters and still photos from each film into the various sizes needed; reducing the file sizes and loading times with only a minimal loss of picture quality.
Technology Transfer List
University Ventures maintains a public, email discussion list called the Technology Transfer List or TECHNO-L. The topic of the list is the transfer of new ideas from university research departments out to the commercial world — patent rights and licensing, venture capital, etc. There are over 1000 subscribers to this list and traffic runs to a dozen or two messages per day. This is the form interface for searching the list’s archives.
Except for supplying the markup for the form fields, I didn’t write the HTML for this page, nor did I do any of the artwork. That was done by , a Web design shop on Union Sq. North. I wrote all the PERL/CGI scripts that drive this application and I also helped design and build the archive database. The applications allows searches based on: date, sender, address, subject and body content. Search results and message pages are dynamically generated from html template files populated with information from the archive database.
Gorda Aero Service
Another early webpage. This is a demo I did for friends at the Bitter End Yatch Club in Virgin Gorda, BVI. The text, logo and Cessna photo were supplied, I did the rest of the layout and artwork working from the client’s brochure in a couple of hours. This page uses a three by three table layout with symmetrical column and row spans. Despite its visual complexity, the page will balance in any sized window, 640×480 pixels or larger. It uses no advanced features and will work with almost any browser, Netscape 2.0 or later, on any computer.
People2People
This is a site for the Synergos Institute, A New York based, non-profit organization providing resources to partner organizations in the Third World. I did most of the site planning and initial HTML programming on a pro-bono basis. Synergos expressed their gratitude by sending me to Ecuador to assist two student interns in getting connected to the Internet in order to provide daily electronic reports back to MSN/Kids. A Microsoft grant provided part of the funding for the project. John Tipton provided the map and other graphic elements used on the site and did additional HTML coding. Some of the photographs I took in Ecuador appear on the site.
The following are all Websites I’ve worked on for a terrific graphics designer, David Schiffer, president of DLS Design, Inc., an award-winning Web and print design shop, down the block from me.
Polytechnic University
This site is an “electronic brochure” for three new advanced degree programs at the Westchester campus of Polytechnic University. I built the site’s frames-based layout with imagemaps and some JavaScript to make the “home” button appear and disappear. There’s a non-frames version of the site for browser’s not capable of displaying frames. The site also includes several forms for requesting additional information processed by CGI scripts I wrote.
Culinart
This is a corporate web site for a dining services company. I wrote several Javascript functions and the custom CGI programming that enables prospective employees to submit their résumés, preserving file types and formatting.
nyhre
New York Harm Reduction Educators was formed to prevent the spread of AIDS through harm reduction services, including syringe exchange, education, women’s health, counseling and legal assistance. My contribution includes the frame-based site layout, Javascript functions for the navigational elements and cgi programming for the contact form.
Herrick Feinstein
A Multi-faceted, law firm, website featuring editorial depth and lush graphics. The Herrick, Feinstein web site covers multiple practice areas, publications in text and PDF format, bios of over 50 attorneys, news of the firm and a special tour of the their New York City architectural ornaments collection. I designed the file layout, programmed the navigational elements and Java applets and provided DLS Design with page templates for the various site areas.
