The Client: Bedlam creates some of the most interesting and original theater in Minneapolis. They run their own production and, in addition, rent their space to other groups. This means they have a large number of events to keep track of and promote,  and they needed a site that could accommodate them all.

My Role: Having designed, built and maintained their version 1 site, I was keenly aware of the workflow issues and front-end pros and cons that they were experiencing. I worked with them to find the new look and feel of the site and to expand the functionality. In the end, the new site was built on WordPress, with collaborative design and unique plugins.

The Technology: One of the initial hurdles of this site was importing the existing years of data into WordPress, including media and event dates. I created a unique plugin for them called TheatreEvents and wrote a custom import script that inserted the new posts and attachments and populated the data. The plugin features direct hooking into the admin interface so that event data entry is in the same form as post entry.  On the front-end, the plugin allows for sorting by the event dates and custom week and month views. The plugin will be released publicly soon.

The Highlights: Weekly calendar in the sidebar of most pages with Ajax navigation. Monthly calendar of events.

The Site:

The Client: Chinet wanted to revamp its site to drive sales of a product line that was deeper than most people knew. As part of a full campaign, OLSON designed, developed and promoted their new website.

My Role: Development lead of concentrated development group. Development planning and production.

The Technology: The client had an existing CMS which they wished to keep. The system had been hand-rolled by another agency. We were asked to work with the CMS, improve it where needed and rebuild the public-facing side using CodeIgniter PHP framework. The end product included an implementation of the Zend Lucene search library and smart data caching to reduce server load and speed load times.  The team developed inviting Flash features for the home page and Moments Calendar on the site. Also, the site used MooTools for JavaScript interactions. Finally, the site was built for progressive enhancement where the content is available without Flash or JavaScript and present for SEO.

The Highlights: Club Chinet where visitors can save recipes and tips and sign up for the Chinet newsletter, Moments Calendar where visitors can find a reason to celebrate any day.

The Site:

The Client: OLSON is dedicated to building social circles around their clients. OLSON designed the new site to show off the ability and results of our work.

My Role: Development lead of concentrated development group. Development planning and production.

The Technology: We wanted to make our site fun, intuitive and easy and the data long-lasting and reusable. The CMS behind the site holds a lot of data about our work and client relationships (more than we could show on the site) and we wanted that data to be reusable for presentations and other communications. We loaded the information into the Daisy CMS and stored it in logical ways that would allow us to easily retrieve whatever we were looking for. On the front end, the site uses Java Faces and a custom caching system to quickly present the data as pulled from our custom Java services. The site uses jQuery for JavaScript interactions.

The Highlights: JavaScript-backed animation of features and features card stack on home page, New and Featured Work, Interactive Client List.

The Client: Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. They needed a blog to maintain contact and conversation with legal professionals.

My Role: Development lead for custom WordPress theme.

The Technology: The data is driven through a WordPress installation but the theme is setup to enable a number of special features. The site uses native category functionality to populate special areas of the site while keeping those specific categories out of the blog flow, e.g. Featured media and Headnote of the Day

The Highlights: Custom design, unique widgets and features.

The Client: Steven Lang needed a site to show his work and needed it to be congruent to his approach and style.

My Role: Development of light-weight, custom CMS to allow the artist to easily update the site. Mr. Lang had a clear idea of how he wanted the site to look and act, and asked me to make the site a reality.

The Technology: The site is built on PHP and MySQL. It features custom JavaScript for the gallery interactions and uses a few CSS tricks to keep the background’s ceiling and floor in place at almost any resolution.

The Highlights: Implementation of the artist’s design vision, unique and JavaScript gallery interaction.

Also, here’s my original post about this generation of the site.