Posts Tagged ‘web’

A little insight into my web work

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

So a couple of days ago, Thursday to be exact, I had to compile a little showcase of sorts of some of the work done by the group that I work for, the Design Research & Informatics Lab at Mississippi State University. It was for accreditation purposes in the College of Architecture, Art + Design.  I spent about 2 hours on it, taking screenshots of the various websites that we’ve done—some of them, not all of them—and I figured I’d share it with any possible readers of this here blog.

Check out the DRIL Project Showcase [PDF]

I’m the one on the far right on the first page, btw.

The designs that I did (other than the entire showcase PDF) are:

  • Monroe County, Mississippi (Go Monroe) - this one unfortunately didn’t turn out how I would have liked; I was asked to add in too many links when I wanted to keep things simple and organized. But this design was originally done by another on our team, and I had to re-work it. (Not yet launched)
  • Boys & Girls Clubs of the Golden Triangle – this one was done on a very limited budget, so it’s very, very simple. The local B&GCs have been struggling financially so they didn’t have the funds for a better one I suppose. (Not yet launched)
  • Injury Mechanics Laboratory – I like how this one turned out, there are some issues I’d still work with on it (not happy with the footer for instance), but overall pretty good.
  • Chickasaw County Development Foundation – I love the concept for this one, but my execution of it wasn’t that great. I was just beginning to really learn to use Illustrator when I did this, during my last semester of grad school. Not quite on the same level as my traditional illustration skills yet. They are going with another design anyway, but I plan to continue to work on this for the portfolio.
  • Form Trainer – Now this one I am exceptionally proud of. I know there are some issues with it too, but this is the best site I’ve done so far, by far. It was very difficult for me to do also considering I had to integrate it in some way with the Yahoo! Stores platform. I never got the hang of RTML or whatever it’s called, so I ended up using their “store tags” instead.

So yeah. There’s a sampling of some of my web work. Still got a lot to learn and a long way to go, but I’m enjoying it every step of the way!

E-Commerce Solutions

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

So I have been sitting here all day playing around with a few shopping cart script solutions for this company. One of my co-workers already had 3 installations of OS Commerce installed, and while I tinkered with its source files a bit I later realized that the whole front-end was comprised entirely of HTML tables! I wish I had noticed that sooner—I would have dropped it like a bad habit hours ago. I haven’t spent the past 2 years learning how to code properly only to revert back to the old days, people. Designing and coding this thing up in tables would be a travesty.

I installed OpenCart after that, which seems pretty simple and is also pretty, which helps. I like pretty things. Unfortunately after I got it all set up, I couldn’t really do much of anything because once I was into the admin area if I idled for more than a minute I would get logged out. After trying multiple ‘fixes’ found on the OC forums, nothing worked. And their host, Network Solutions, won’t let you touch the php.ini in the event that this was (probably) a sessions issue. I did try adding php.ini’s into the directory and the admin directory with the fixes as directed but, again, no luck. So, OpenCart was deleted.

I noticed Network Solutions’ hosting comes with the ability to add Magento, so I installed that through their administrator panel. Easy to setup, but once I got in there I was completely lost what to do, and the documentation is abysmal. The front-end AND back-end were also incredibly slow loading, and this is on NetSol. Shared NetSol, but still… NetSol. The very first domain registrar. It sucks, because I kind of want to learn Magento, but oh well. Magento was nixed. I’m trying OpenCart once again, and hoping that maybe the problems I had the first time were just a bug. Maybe it’ll work this time. If not… I guess I’ll have to figure out Magento, because I refuse to use tables-heavy OS Commerce.