simpledream web studio is very proud to announce the newly revised wingsbirds.com, home to WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide. It was a large undertaking—ten months in the making—as well as a fun and challenging project.

The goals of this site realign included modernizing the behind-the-scenes workflow at the company, bringing the code up to current web standards, and realigning the visual layout to improve readability, accessibility, and cross-browser performance. As an added bonus, the cosmetic changes provide a better showcase for WINGS’ spectacular collection of photography.

The WINGS site is very content-focused, and my intention was to allow the content to engage the visitor. The design is simple and clean, readable and friendly. See older versions of the site for comparison.

Creating an administrative interface for WINGS staff to edit the site content online was the project’s biggest challenge. Previously, all the static HTML pages were generated in Word, Excel, or Adobe GoLive and then sent via FTP to the web server. The ability to update the quickly and easily was an important change.

The new site uses CakePHP, the rapid development framework inspired by Ruby on Rails, not only to serve the public part of the site from database-driven templates but also to create the administrative interface for content editing.

I partnered with Sam DeVore of TeachesMe.com on the CakePHP work, and he did a marvelous job implementing the CMS and programming both public and admin sites. Sam’s advice and development expertise were influential in the overall success of WINGS’ new site.

The administrative part of this project will continue to evolve, but for now the public pages speak for themselves. Explore the web site and get a taste for the amazing amount of quality content such as photo galleries, narratives, and bird lists.

Launch Date: August 21st, 2006
Work Done: Two projects in one: the public site realign and the CMS administrative site creation. Both projects included graphic design, front-end coding in XHTML/CSS/JS, PHP programming, and content migration from thousands of static HTML files into the new Content Management System (CMS).

One of the reason’s I haven’t posted much to simpledream blog lately is overwork: several large web projects are under way here at simpledream. I haven’t had a free minute to think and write.

One issue I do have time to dwell on each day is repetitive stress injury (RSI). With 14-18 hour days working at the computer the last two weeks, my body is starting to feel it…I have tried to break at least 5 minutes every hour, but it doesn’t always work out well.

Today I saw a great article on avoiding RSI on Google’s blog. If you are working long hours at the keyboard and mouse, RSI is definitely an issue. The article gives some great tips for staying fit and healthy while pounding the keys.

Hopefully soon I’ll come up for air and get back to a normal workday. If you know of any other great tips on avoiding work-related stress, send them my way.

My favorite hosting company, Dreamhost, just got better! Besides the high-quality and low cost of their services, they just enabled support for two features that makes the deal even sweeter. While you could use these third-party services before today, it was a nightmare to set up and manage them. Dreamhost has gracefully changed that for all of us by providing management and setup right through their web-based control panel.

1. Jabber IM support is now (officially) enabled! In Dreamhost’s nice array of goodies, this was one that was lacking. It was hard to set up and not fully supported. Now, if you have an account with them, you can set up your own chat users and run your IM through your Dreamhost account server. Very useful because you don’t have to rely on mainstream IM services like AIM, Yahoo, or MSN anymore and can also add security and other features.
2. Subversion support! Dreamhost has been lacking in this regard, so this is great news for any web developer. I’ve managed a few projects with SVN on Dreamhost before, but couldn’t quite get it right due to lack of good documentation and poor control of the SVN repository and users. Now Dreamhost allows you to manage your SVN projects right through their administrative panel! It seems to be very simple to use and easy to get going on a new project.

The announcement of these two services simply made my day! Even just one out of two would have been great; both of them at the same time is almost too much fun…

If you haven’t checked out Dreamhost, take a look to see what they have to offer. The basic plan comes in at $7.95/month, and it’s all you’ll ever need unless you are hosting lots of client sites or have extremely high bandwidth needs.

Yay Dreamhost!

I am very pleased to announce a new web site from simpledream web studio, The Running Shop: Tucson, Arizona. Though the project did involve some visual changes, the bulk of the work was under the hood. The old site was static files built in HTML, and updating was difficult and didn’t happen much because of it. For comparison, check out the old site on Archive.org.

The new site is built with web standards technologies: CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript+DOM. To take care of updating the site content, the site is now framed out with CakePHP, which is the Ruby on Rails for PHP enthusiasts. CakePHP has lots of content management possibilities, and the result is what I would consider the ultimate in a lightweight CMS (since it isn’t intended for blogging like lots of other nice tools).

The project was lots of fun, mainly because I had lots of freedom with the design and code. I was able to put into practice many of the standards-based methods for web design and development that I talk and read about, as well as create a fresh, professional, and attractive look for The Running Shop.

If you are interested in more technical programming or design details, go see the Colophon page on the new site.

One of the most fun sites I have done went live recently: Expressions of Abstraction by H. Fun not only to code, but to design as well.

Due to the dominant nature of the artwork to be displayed, the design had to be subtle and minimal. I endeavor to make both of these attributes common in my design work, so it was a chance once again to build a solid design framework that gives way to powerful imagery.

With beautiful images as the main purpose for a site, it reminded me much of another project, Dan Davis Photography. The difference with Abstract by H is the artist and I decided not to do the usual black or white background, instead choosing a neutral dark grey.

For information about how the site was put together, see the Colophon page on the Abstract site.

Happy New Year! I hope your 2005 was wonderful; I had a great year. Simpledream is now 1 year old…I can’t believe it’s already been 12 months. Amazing.

A very big thank you to all my clients, colleagues, friends, and family for making this business possible. I could not do it without you! Thanks for your business and your support. I look forward to working with you more in the coming months.

Best wishes for 2006!