My involvement with the site was to design and build the entire site, including designing the Logo (which came to be mostly by accident, the logo is a combination of the letters D J and S U N). The entire design and back end was partly a re-use of a framework I’ve built and used for many websites.
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I don’t call myself a designer for the reason that design is not my full-time job. That said, a lot of times Photoshop is open as much as I have Eclipse or other programming editors open. I enjoy design, it’s a wind-down from programming 8 hours a day and a great brain exercise as it’s completely different from coding.
As such, I have designed and built a few websites (apart from those I use myself). This page shows a few of these. Most were created for friends on a no-cost basis, which is how I usually prefer to do it as the design feels more free and the stress level is much lower. And designing websites can be furiously frustrating when it comes to dealing with CSS/Javascript/and pixel-pushing alignments. Any web designer can tell you much more about that.
Web Related
DJ Sunseek – 2009, 2010
DJ Sunseek (or just “Sunseek” – as he prefers it) is a good friend of mine who plays and creates great Minimal and Electronic music. He plays mostly bars and clubs around Zurich, Switzerland, but as he is in the process of marketing himself and moving up to a bigger “stage”, he asked me for help building a website. He wanted a basic and simple portal where people can see upcoming events (where he’s playing next) as well as find music and other information. As the site is for a friend I only charged him a few drinks at the bar for it. Two sections are still to come, the photos and the music, once I get the content for them.
KL AeroParts – 2009
KL AeroParts is a company specializing in selling parts for the aeronautical industry (helicopters, aeroplanes etc). They owned their domain names but had nothing more than a simple (and rather ugly) contact-information page as their homepage. They eventually want an entire site but the urgent part was to get a “professional” front page and a contact page where visitors could fill out a quote request that would be automatically mailed to KL themselves and stored on the backend. The design was built to accommodate a content-heavy site and the design was created to be a framework for displaying content instead of aiming for flashy images and “cool” design. A specific color scheme was the only requirement as far as the design went.
My involvement with the site was to design and build the entire site, including designing the Logo. The entire design and back end (re-use of a framework I’ve built) was built in a total of two weeks as there was great urgency to get something up “now”.
Pacifico Bar – 2008, 2009
Pacifico Bar is a small bar located in the heart of old-town Zurich, Switzerland that has a really great atmosphere and excellent drinks. The domain for the bar was owned by someone who registered and parked it in hopes of making some money, but it eventually expired and the owner of the bar registered it and wanted a website on it. The idea was to have something small and to-the-point with the ability to post bar events (such as DJ’s playing) and pictures from past events.
My involvement with the site was to design and build the entire site, including the Admin interface. The design and building took place over many months as there was no direct deadline apart from “as soon as possible”.
MyAfya – 2008
MyAfya (Swahili for “My Good Health”) is a site built for a health center located in Zambia, Africa. MyAfya focuses on health, nutrition and healing through alternative methods. The site was built so that no specific content sections had to be predetermined, but the client had full flexibility over creating all content later, including re-ordering and re-organizing sections of the site.
My involvement with the site was to design and build the entire site, including the Admin interface. The design went through multiple phases as did some of the back-end. In the end it’s a mostly custom implementation using very little third party code.
My Housing Guide – 2006 – (Design now considered outdated by me)
MyHousingGuide is a (Bay Area) Real Estate Search Engine with many features. It uses raw MLS data that is downloaded at intervals and is displayed in a much simplified format (as MLS data is highly detailed) to the end user. Some features include: RSS feeds on saved searches, Emailed updates, Customized searches, Google map integration, Administrative interfaces, and much more.
My involvement with the site was not only back-end, but also design. Everything seen on the site is my doing. Very little existing scripts were used, and 95% of the code is written from scratch.
Ski and Sun Cabin – 2005 – (Design now considered outdated by me)
Ski and Sun Cabin was built for a client that had bought a cabin in beautiful Lake Tahoe. She wanted to rent out the cabin, but had no time to take calls. The client wanted an administrative interface that would allow them to set prices for certain dates, certain seasons and be able to black-out dates and much much more. They also wanted an entire booking system with payment processing.
My involvement with the site was to design and build the entire site (although as of 2009 the design is a bit dated). The booking system was the most difficult part to build as it was built as a step-by-step booking system, where the user can go back at any point and change parameters. The system also had to calculate all the costs depending on many date-related and season-related variables and custom client preferences (such as bringing Pets). Payment processing is done via PayPal’s merchant services.
