World Wide Web

This self-promotion site is one of the best and most recent examples of my web design work, but I'll include a few others just to be thorough:

Screen capture of search page   Screen capture of results page
Dealer Locator Mapping Application (screenshots only; site has been redesigned )
2001, Client: Globalstar USA, Walnut Creek, CA

During the latter half of 2000 and early 2001 I worked with Kenneth Tyler of 8th Fold on a number of projects for Globalstar USA. The most recent project (and the only one that was visible to the general public) was a mapping application for the dealer locator page on their site. The locator was built with the ASP version of MapInfo's MapXsite product. The locator let customers click on a state to see where all the dealers in their state are located, or they could search by zip code to find the dealers who were closest to them. (I only did the mapping application; the navigational links and graphics above and to the left were already part of their site.)

Most of the rest of my time was spent creating a code-generating system that was used to build and maintain Globalstar USA's in-house call center application. The generator examines a SQL Server database, drops and regenerates a variety of stored procedures and auxiliary tables that are derived from the tables and columns in the database, and then builds a series of ColdFusion templates that are used to call the procedures.

The generator is a two-part beast. The back-end database manipulations are handled by a series of stored procedures which in turn generate the derived procedures and tables. The user interface is a web page handled by an IIS WebClass application (a combination of HTML templates and a DLL written in VisualBasic). The WebClass invokes the stored procedures, then gets a list of all the generated procedures and processes the list to generate the ColdFusion templates for each procedure.

I found the code generator to be an interesting problem, and I hope to be able to do more work of that sort in the future. I've since read "Program Generators With XML and Java", by J. Craig Cleaveland, and I think my next attempt will be significantly better.


PowerGroups.com

1998-2001, Employer/Client: BizDat, Inc., Madison, WI

After I moved to Berkeley, my employer, Woodland Communications, morphed into BizDat, Inc. and began developing the PowerGroups web site. I was involved in the initial brainstorming design sessions, and I later contributed extensively to the programming for all three layers of the application: stored procedures for the SQL Server back-end database, ASP pages for the front end, and COM objects written in Visual Basic that handled communication between the web pages and the database. In particular, I did stored procedures for the Links tool, and was responsible for all three layers in the Tasks and Polls tools.


StarNine Home Page
and Header Graphics (screenshots only; site has been redesigned several times since I worked on it )
1999, Client: StarNine Technologies, Inc., Berkeley, CA

StarNine hired me to create a new home page graphic and new page headers for their site, which they were revamping to correspond with the release of WebSTAR 4.0. For the headers I created both the graphics and the table that held them. The table adjusted to the width of the browser window so that the little icon graphic that identified the part of the site that you were in was always at the upper right of the window.

My work is no longer visible StarNine was later bought by 4D Inc., and the site was completely redesigned again.

I went through quite a few variations on the home page and the headers before arriving at the final versions.


McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research

1997, Client: University of Wisconsin, Madison

This was a freelance job. The client wanted me to use their existing logo and logo text, so I based the color scheme on their logo colors. I used a relatively simple navigation scheme using frames, with an outline-style index of the site in the left frame. Each outline element can be collapsed or expanded to show it's sub-pages, and almost every page can be reached from the index.

The client wasn't comfortable using Javascript for the collapsible outline, so I got the same effect by using a series of outline pages, one for each item that needed to be expanded. This works well as long as only one branch of the tree can be expanded at a time and there aren't too many levels to the site. It would be totally impractical, however, if you wanted to allow the user to expand more than one item at once because the number of pages required to cover every possible combination would grow exponentially.

I used a similar navigation scheme for this self-promotion site, but omitted the frames. The McArdle site seems to have gone through a partial redesign, and while they kept the basic look and organization of my design, they have also removed the frames.


Demco Media Web Site and Online Catalogs (no longer available; working copies of the Turtleback Books and Periodical Subscription Service catalogs are available on this site.)
1995(?), Client: Demco Media, Madison, WI

The logo, rainbow stripe and home page design were forced on me, and the Periodicals FAQ was done by someone else, but I built the interactive catalog and ordering system. I used Filemaker Pro and Tango (a medium-duty graphical RAD tool that could connect to a variety of databases; it now seems to be an orphaned product) to build Demco Media's Turtleback Books Catalog and Periodical Subscription Service Catalog. (The catalogs are being served from my computer because the site was brought in-house by Demco Media, so the site I built for them is no longer active.)

Both catalogs allowed the user to assemble a shopping basket of items and email them to the company. I would have added the ability to accept payments online as well, but the client wasn't willing to go that far.

Last update: November 21, 2005