Crystal's Adventures in Webdev Land » php

Seelund Trading Co Guild Website

Crys — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 21:44:57 +0000

This is the website for my World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic guild, Seelund Trading Co. The base site is built on phpbb3 with the index and information pages maintained in the cms MX-Publisher (whose website seems to have vanished as of this posting. Guess it’s a good thing I can update and change the programming as I need to myself). I have made substantial programming changes to my copy of MX, including changing the way news posts (posts in the forums that are designated as “Announcements”) are sorted so that the one that expires soonest rises to the top of the front page.

The biggest amount of work I’ve done on the site though is the custom theme. The current design is the second — the first included only World of Warcraft imagery back when we were a WoW-only guild. I used the default phpbb theme as a foundation and then rewrote the better part of it so that it would properly reflow on a smaller screen or with non-default font sizes. The images are all manipulated/cutout screenshots I took from the two games.

As part of both designs for the site, I created logos for the guild, which are used in promotional items such as videos and recruitment posts:

December 2011

February 2010

Future improvements planned for the theme include a mobile-specific version and having the characters at the top randomly chosen from a pool of images of the current members of the guild on load. Current programming projects in progress on the site include a section for user-controlled character profiles and an event calendar that users can post to as their characters (watch the blog for project updates).

Myers Listing Syndication

Crys — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 23:00:12 +0000

Myers Listings Syndication screen

One of the features in Myers AgentCenter/OriginatorNetwork that I worked on the interface for is the Listing Syndication product. The challenge with this interface was to make it easy for non-technical people to, not just use within the confines of AgentCenter, but for them to take their listings and use it in places that don’t allow direct syndication, such as Craigslist (which specifically prohibits any automated submissions). The solution to this was to take each of the four different layouts for listings within our system and convert them to Craigslist-friendly html, ready to be simply pasted from our application:

Myers Listings Syndication Get HTML dialog screen

Besides the usual “change color on hover,” “sort by heading” sorts of interaction you expect from a records list table, we needed to denote which listings lacked information required by the sites we syndicate to, so we added a grayed-out style for those records with an alert that tells the user what’s missing and offers them a link back to put the information in. I initially designed this table to allow inline editing for that information but that feature was cut in favor of the simple link.

Mt. Mary Event Registration

Crys — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:53:03 +0000

Mt. Mary Events Registration Form

Mt. Mary needed an event registration form that could both send them information via email and post over to a credit card vendor at the same time. It also needed to be easy to update but had no database or admin system to work through. So I used a php array to allow the client easy access to update the events without the need for them to learn html or javascript. This form includes the ability to add/delete guests and a running subtotal, as well as in-place validations via jquery which are then revalidated via php in case the user has javascript off. Since this was originally posted, however, Mt. Mary has moved on to using a third party for their event registration.

You know you’re a geek when…

Crys — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:56:53 +0000

You know you’re a geek when…

… you spend your Memorial Day bouncing between making a checklist for finally upgrading your WoW guild’s (Keepers of Stromgarde) forums/portal application, moving content from your old website to your new, trying to get your calluses back for the guitar you finally have again after more than a decade without playing (ouch), modding your WordPress files, and writing a serial story for one of your MCs (Adrien/Aydrien Seelund — watch this space for the first story soon) who’s been both a Birthright and and World of Warcraft character at this point…

… all while having had more good red beer than any rational being should consume…

Keepers of Stromgarde

Crys — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:11:18 +0000

the Keepers of Stromgarde‘s site has gone through several iterations, on multiple versions of phpbb and the CMS MX-Publisher. I was responsible for two of them, from initial concept through custom theme. I also created the guild’s logo.

Summer 2008

July 2009

Logo

Schroeder Bros. Construction, Inc.

Crys — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 17:06:17 +0000

Schroeder Bros. Construction Inc.

This is one of my favorite designs. They were great to work with and they made it really easy to make the site for them. They do amazing work and gave me excellent photos to work from. If I was building a house, I’d want them to do it — and I’m not just saying that because they were clients. Go take a look at some of the gorgeous woodwork in their gallery.

Fixed width site with repeating background. All of the textures used in the site are sampled from client-supplied photos from their homes, including the background/bracketing texture. The site has been redesigned since my work on it, but they continue to use the banners I created for them:

Precision Screw Thread Corp.

Crys — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 18:18:34 +0000

The initial landing page for the site was conceived as an abstracted display panel from one of the threading machines and evolved into what you see on the page now. We wanted to showcase the short movie but avoid the typical “trash splash” intro that trips up a lot of sites. This display panel instead brings together the site’s navigation and news from the company blog to make it easy for users to get where they want to go on the site (I was outvoted on making the movie start playing immediately. Sorry visitors, you’ll have to hit stop instead of start).

Visit Site: Precision Screw Thread, Inc.

The internal pages carry through the theme and the navigation from the intro page. We wanted to add a little motion so I animated the starburst behind the logo in the upper left so that it glows and rotates on mouseover.

Associated Surgical & Medical Specialists, LLC

Crys — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 17:40:33 +0000

Associated Surgical & Medical Specialists, LLC

Liquid layout, javascript enhancement, dynamically generated menu items

Lithograhics.com

Crys — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 13:50:45 +0000

Lithographics, Inc. – Quality Printing, Superior Production

The brief for Lithographics included a small book that they print and use for promotions and my task was to keep the website in line with that book while still giving them a dynamic — in both design and technical terms — site that would stand out from the competition and convey the quality of their print work despite being a non-print medium.

I wrote all the code and markup for this site, with the exception of the reference desk, which I heavily modified from an application written in-house by another programmer at the company, and I created all the banner ads using single-frame cel animation techniques in Photoshop and ImageReady. I also converted all the photos from press-ready to web-ready with an eye to making them look the way they looked after coming off the press, rather than just making them look like digital photos.

Each section of the site had its own photo. Here are mockups of two of those other two sections:

Banners:

Twilight Games

Crys — Tue, 09 Sep 2003 19:26:21 +0000

This site is no longer available, but here’s a screenshot and one of the animated banners I did for the site.