John Dinca Designs

John Dinca is a good friend of mine who shares an entrenpenurial spirit. His latest venture, John Dinca Designs, was born out of an opportunity he seized upon when the home theater chain he worked for went out of business. He has had good success taking the ball and running with it on high end home theater installation. John came to me wanting a professional looking site that he could manage himself.

I focused on creating an easy to use CMS for him while my go to graphic design buddy, Mike Gobeli of neuegrafik.net handled the design. What resulted was a professional and functional site that John uses to advertise his services and establish a presence in San Diego.

• CSS/XHTML
• Ruby on Rails
• Database Design (MySQL)
• Javascript/AJAX
• Custom CMS
• SEO
• Project Management

neuegrafik.net

Neuegrafik.net is my graphic design buddy Mike Gobeli's personal blog. It works in tandem with a weekly email he sends out with some very interesting design bits. The design is of course Mike's, but I developed the app. I was in the process of recreating nuttersmark.com and its blog from scratch anyways so I rolled the same app out for Mike. Any updates to the nuttersmark/blog software I roll out for me I also roll out for him.

Textediting is handled by TinyMCE as usual with my own custom image uploader. Mike, as many designers do, had very specific requirements for the typography, so I turned to sIFR to serve up his font of choice, Futura. The result is very clean and modern and alleviates the need for him to create a new photoshop title every time he posts an item.

The archives section is my favorite part of neuegrafik.net and I really have to hand it to Mike for the concept. I wired it up to display the next 10 posts in reverse chronological order. Very cool take on the fat footer.

• CSS/XHTML
• Ruby on Rails
• Database Design (MySQL)
• Javascript/AJAX
• Custom CMS
• SEO

CRC-ASPEx :: Application Service Provider Experts

CRC-ASPEx came to me with a need for a complete site overhaul. I came to them with two design mockups, one that was more conservative with muted tones and boxes with rounded corners, and the other which was a bit more progressive which is the design you see to the left. I was glad they chose to go for the riskier "blue spectrum" look I created which to differentiates their company from their competitors and sticks out in the users mind.

For the design I wanted the site to make a bold statement while still remaining professional. I applied a slight rainbow spectrum underneath the blue background to give it depth. The text is differentiated by a similar rainbow spectrum behind a checked pattern. I am working with CRC-ASPEx to develop a consulting portal where prime consultants will be able to submit their credentials to CRC where they could then be utilized for clients.

• Layout and Design
• Branding
• CSS/XHTML
• SEO

ACECMN :: American Council of Engineering Companies Minnesota

ACECMN went to CRC-ASPEx a complete site overhaul which marked the beginning of my relationship with CRC-ASPEx. ACECMN wanted online registration, a content management system, and complete backend for tracking every aspect of their website including transactions, memberships, events, and static content.

ACECMN had been using Microsoft Front Page to edit their existing website and which had little to no dynamic features. It was clear that they would benefit from moving away from the proprietary and unsupported Frontpage to a more open and versatile solution, which ended up being tinyMCE and Ruby on Rails. This allows the ACECMN staff to edit the site from anywhere without having to stay up to date with Microsoft licensing fees. The content management system is my own design, which allows the user to order and categorize pages within the main navigation using AJAX draggable elements. Pictures and files can be uploaded to the site via the browser, and then embedded in the pages. The learning curve proved to be relatively moderate and the ACECMN staff can maintain their site with little to no HTML knowledge

The other key request by ACECMN was an online calendar and event registration system. Using a common ruby calendar plugin, I was able to create a very straightforward registration backed by the ActiveMerchant gem. ACECMN can now take payment via paypal for events they traditionally had to advertise and manage via snail-mail. Users can create accounts, find out whether or not their firm is a member, associate themselves with that firm and add other members to the account, register for events and log back in at a later date to check on payment status and attendance history. We hope to roll out a broader version to ACEC's in other states, and then to other non-profits in general.

I handled the project management for the site from start to finish, including the maintenance and re-tooling of features and functionality. My aim was to create a web application that was cost effective, standards based, and powerful with code that is clean enough for any other developer to jump in on the project and take the reins. This project involved creating software for novice computer users with a wide variety of needs and feature requests. As far as the user base goes, being engineers they are the most analytical and difficult to please of any site I have created to date.

It should be noted that the design had been established before I started working on the site

• CSS/XHTML
• Ruby on Rails
• Database Design (MySQL)
• Javascript/AJAX
• Custom CMS
• E-Commerce
• User Account Creation System
• SEO
• Project Management
• Ongoing Service and Support

oqodo.com :: Tiny Web Communities

Oqodo is a site a friend of mine and I created to help us and our friends keep in touch with eachother. Oqodo is not just another social networking site or forum. All posts are listed chronologically, and threads are cleverly organized in a way that preserves its blog-like format. There are multiple viewing options for all tastes.

Connectivity is at the forefront of oqodo, with hooks into Twitter, Last.fm, Digg, Seeqpod, and Google Charts so that at any given moment you can tell what your buddies are up to online. The idea is to keep the community small enough so that it's just a place where you're interacting with your closest friends, just like you did back in the day before everyone moved all over the world.

The design is by Mike Gobeli of neuegrafik.net and driven by Ruby on Rails with heavy doses of javascript and ajax. We used TinyMCE for the post text editor, the horizontal scroller from Coda, and the accordion from Stickmanlabs.com. Everything else is built from scratch.

• CSS/XHTML
• Ruby on Rails
• Database Design (MySQL)
• Javascript/AJAX
• Custom CMS
• SEO
• Information Architecture
• Project Management

Area Studios

Area Studios is my web development company. The design is a liquid layout with plenty of modern web 2.0 design elements. The site was designed during my liquid layout love affair period, which I have recently backed away from. Liquid layouts have a place but they are a pain to make work. I wanted the site to be simple and to the point.

It started out as a completely front end site aside from the blog functionality, but because at the time I couldn't afford a basecamp account I decided to build a full fledged project management backend. Like basecamp it has support for multiple users, task, lead, and client management, and sports a dashboard where every action is logged and viewable. It my first big rails application and I have since finally opened up a basecamp account (now I know why they charge what they do, it's worth every penny).

Area is somewhat dormant for the time being while I figure out what my next step is professionally but it's still a good example of what I can do.

• CSS/XHTML
• Ruby on Rails
• Database Design (MySQL)
• Javascript/AJAX
• User Account Creation System
• Project Management

Oakedalemac.com

Oakdalemac.com is more an example of my skills as a designer than anything. I took many cues from Apple.com of course to keep things cohesive, but I feel I differentiated the site enough from the mothership. This page was created to help support me and my customers in my job with Apple as a "Solutions Consultant", which is a fancy name for somebody who runs the Apple store in a Best Buy.

I had grand plans for this site that never really materialized but the design is solid.

• CSS/XHTML
• Layout/Design