ClayAndSteel.com

000016
Sunday, 01 June 2008 @ 07:57 AM

clayandsteel.com My wife Celeste's artist portfolio site. This is what got me a great deal of interest from the Academy of Art University sculpture department. Several students are asking that I create a site for them. Simplistic design, but i've grown out of CSS trickery for trivial things. Generated content is nice, but too involved for simple things. This site has a few bugs in the (as of writing) alpha version of IE8, but every other rendering engine gets the picture.

Link to live site: clayandsteel.com

Nubianbooks.co.uk

000009
Monday, 26 May 2008 @ 01:37 PM
Nubianbooks.co.uk finished design

Because he liked my approach and design so much on his son's project QTReporter so much (?), the owner of this ill-fated site requested a website for his pet project, an online bookstore for the topics of Nubian culture within the UK. The site was never populated with products and as of writing, is no longer a valid domain name.

The site was run off of a shopping cart package called ZenCart which was free and sure showed it. <table> tags roamed freely. Although I have much love for the idea of a free eCommerce package with such extensibility, ZenCart was, in essence, a horrendous mess. The difficulty in simply getting a USD to GBP locale conversion set up was compounded when the software wouldn't recognize a UK postal code with it's wacky numbers and letters and whitespace characters.

The ZenCart community was very small but helpful and in the end I was successful. Even had a root certificate running.... but never got a phone call from the client after that. Lost interest I guess.

I was a bit frustrated and took the site off of my hard drive, but managed to find a near completion .jpg from an AIM conversation we had: Nubianbooks.co.uk

QTReporter.com

000008
Monday, 26 May 2008 @ 11:32 AM

QTReporter Thumbnail
A Quentin Tarantino Fanboy's site for all he deems worthy. This site was pro-bono, as such, he was niether too serious about it's usage, nor it's current upkeep.

Naturally, he's since taken the site down, but I've preserved at least some of it here.

Link to archive of the site: QTReporter.com

Uniquedezignz.com

000011
Monday, 26 May 2008 @ 11:25 AM
UniqueDezignz thumbnail

Here we have the fun and enjoyable idea of unliscensed cartoon paintings applied to glasses, plates, and bowls by an artist who is quite talented and devoted to her works. Beginning life in a Something Awful Forums thread, this project came to my attention after trying to order a cute little cloud with a broken bottom and was unable to navigate the horrendous site that popped up after the goons got wind of it.

After having just finished Personalized-Art.com, I offered to do it for free simply to expand my portfolio. The artist never got back to me to work out the details (hosting, purchasing system, account information, but I went ahead and finished it anyway.

Link to a one page live archive of the site: UniqueDezignz.com

I'm quite proud of the nav bar that used the latest (at the time) in CSS trickery: the sliding hover image. I liked simple solutions that used no javascript as I often turned it off in my day to day browsing.

Personalized-Art.com

000012
Tuesday, 20 May 2008 @ 10:42 AM
Personalized-Art.com

The idea for my wife (my fiancee at the time) to sell her art on the internet was one born of desparation for money.

Soon enough, the idea fizzled out, and Celeste went to school to make better art, but it remains here because it was the first XHTML/CSS website I'd ever done.

Link live archive of the site: Personalized-Art, though it seems to need a bit of debugging nowadays.

I had a bit of fun with the CSS gallery, though my eyesight must have been much better back then, as artifacting is everywhere! Ick.

Interestingly enough, I still have a super early "We don't know anything about HTML" snapshot of the site, only real small so you can't see anything. It was a mess of FONT tags and MSPaint