Web Design & Development Projects

Brunton Power Calculator App

This project got me out of my comfort zone a little bit. Another developer had done some of the initial design for this app and then it was handed off to me to re-write it for a significantly different design. Wading through the code was a little intimidating, but I figured it out and delivered a great product. This app was so successful we used it to make a kiosk iPad app and revised it for the mobile site as well.

One challenge we had with this project is that it had to be build in Shopify, meaning that we couldn’t use a database to store the different options. We decided to use a JSON array to store and edit the data and to build both the selection and recommendation pages.

Mountain Matchmaker Facebook App

One of my favorite things about working at Voltage is the variety of projects I get to work on. One week it is a WordPress site, the next a Shopify theme, the next a landing page with API integration, and a while back (I’m a little behind) it was a Facebook page app called Mountain Matchmaker. This app has both a mobile and a desktop site, the mobile being responsive.

This project presented several challenges, one of which was the fact that Facebook page apps break on mobile. That is unacceptable in my book so we had to do some fancy redirection based on device type. Fun stuff!

The matchmaker campaign even got some local recognition.

Voltage Payments App

It has been slow this January and with some down time Seth asked me to write an app that allows us to take recurring payments from both our clients and for our clients. The app turned out great.

The real challenge was syncing data across our database and authorize.net. I had to architect a user table and store some information about the user on our server that allowed us to find their account on authorize.net and authorize a payment.

Reebok’s Iconic Gear

I still remember when I got my first pair of Reeboks. I was about 15 years old, I had saved the money I worked for all summer at a boy scout camp and I splurged on a guitar, an amp, and a pair of blue and white Reebok shoes. I was rolling in more cash than I had ever seen and blew almost all of it when I got home from camp. Good times.

That memory was one of the reasons it was so fun to build the page above. It wasn’t complicated code by any means, just simple HTML and CSS, but it was fun to look at some of the new shoes coming out soon and it was fun to build a site, even a quick one-pager, for a brand I’ve loved for many years.

Centura Health Responsive Website Development

One of the things I like most about my new job at Voltage is the interesting projects I get to work on. It seems like there is always new and challenging problems and Centura Health was no exception.

In addition to a bunch of animation surprises, I had to figure out how to make a fully functional map into a full-screen background and then allow users to interact with it. Users can find the closes hospital by searching their zip code and they can see detailed information about any hospital by clicking on the map marker. All this is done without even needing a database. Pretty cool huh?

When I started this project I had no idea if this type of map was even possible. Turns out that Google has done an amazing job with their Maps API and it was much easier than I anticipated. The hardest part of the whole project was making the site responsive in all browsers, even the villainous IE7. Curse you Microsoft!

I guess I’ll end on that note. May all your interactions with IE7 be breif. 🙂

MyNiceTie Redesign

One of my first entrepreneurial endeavors was MyNiceTie. When I got home from serving in Russia a friend, and business partner, gave me $7,000 to start what we thought would be a nationwide necktie company. I took the investment, flew to South Korea, and bought 2,000 ties. At that time, having a website wasn’t even in the plan, I just knew I could buy ties for almost nothing and sell them cheaper in the US for a healthy profit (brilliant strategy, right? ;). This was the decision that led me to a love an passion for internet ventures.

The latest news with MyNiceTie is I just finished the redesign the site. I transferred everyting from Magento on my server to Shopify. I needed to do it quickly, so I used a pretty sweet responsive template and created a custom homepage banner. I also created a better product sorter on the category page.

For years MyNiceTie was build on Magento and I never had time to keep up with updates. I also found Magento to be slow and bulky on both the front-end and admin. This week it was time for an upgrade and although I started to design a new Magento site, I quickly ran into the bulky mess of transferring my old site to a new one. At this point I wondered if there was anything new in eCommerce these days.

Interestingly enough, not much has changed in the past couple years in eCommerce. Magento is still the leader and there are a couple other platforms, each with their pros and cons. However, I came across an article that mentioned Shopify. I had heard of them repetitively because of their sponsorship of Mixergy, an entrepreneurial podcast I love, but I had never looked into them.

I was pleasantly surprised with what I found. I loved the idea that I’d never have to worry about another update, I also loved the fact that my site would load noticeably faster than on Magento. In addition, it was very easy to switch, although it could have been even easier if they had fixed a bug that cost me about 5 hours of dev time.

The platform isn’t perfect yet though, there are a couple things I really don’t like about their solution and if you know of any others, let me know below. The ones I’ve found so far are you can’t use a custom SSL certificate and the product importer needs to be improved. For now, however, I can live with these problems.

I launched the new site early Friday morning and its too early to tell, but so far direct traffic and page views have doubled and it feels like orders have also increased. I’m sure I’ll give you an update shortly.

Till then, check out the site and let me know what you think below. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Oktoberfest

It may have seemed like I dropped off the face of the planet for the past three weeks, but I’ve been working on several cool projects for Voltage. After completing the Oktoberfest site they offered me a job and I start the end of next week.

I had fun getting this site looking almost identical to the PSD from the designer. I also used Git and Git Sub-modules to control the files and database. If an update to this site made it crash, I could roll it back to the last stable version and deploy it easily (in theory, however, the client is on a server with only FTP access).

HappyFreebie Site Development

Update: this site is now called goodsbee.com

I did 90% of the development on the site.