The Womens Initiative

January 15 2008

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The Women's Initiative (www.thewomensinitiative.org) is a new non-profit organization for women based here in Charlottesville, Virginia. Their Mission Statement:

"To provide effective education, social support, and counseling services to empower women of all ages to transform challenging life situations into opportunities for personal growth and renewed well being."

Michelle came to us wanting a professional site that reflected their organization's personality. Right off the bat our lead designer Jenny created a design that captured what Michelle and her colleagues were looking for.  We love it when that happens :). Right away Michelle picked up the how's and why's of editing the web site using the Content Management System. The whole process went smoothly and was fun. If you or someone you know needs their services give Michelle a call, she's one of the nicest people you can meet and a lot of fun to talk to.

technologies used: css, ajax / javascript, html, sql, mysql, flash, actionscript, php, content management system, php, email list management software.

skills used: programming, web design, graphic design

LexingtonCoffee.com Online Store

January 14 2008

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Lexington Coffee provides wholesale and mail order coffee based in Lexington, Virginia. They were in the middle of creating their online store and asked us to take over.  We took their design and integrated a better online store and added a Content Management System to help them manage the entire website in-house. We added features such as password-protected downloads for their wholesaler order forms.

Starting with an existing unfinished web site/application is always a challenge. It requires you to spend additional time figuring out what to keep and what to lose, without allowing your time to get sucked into the "paralysis of analysis". In this case there wasn't much we could reuse, only keeping their look-and-feel. The lesson is that good planning can really save time with future changes. Choose the wrong software and/or write poor code and you are stuck with something that doesn't scale and is expensive to maintain.

Six Degrees of Freedom

January 13 2008

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SixDegreesOfFreedom.com [this site is now offline, but a demo can be found here - http://my.onerhino.com/six/ ] was created to help folks find the "right" place to live in the NYC area. It provides a map of local craigslist.org for sale/rent/lease/sublet properties and filter them by price, rooms and more. You can then figure out where you want to live by adding your own map "markers" (home, work, gym, etc.).

Building this web application was a lot of fun. It's basically a mashup of craigslist.org and google maps plus the ability to add your own listings. To implement we used a lot of ajax and a bit of php and database work. We recently added an archive feature where visitors will be able to view mapped properties that are no longer listed on craigslist. Site owner William Steel thinks this is a good way to see how available properties change over time.

technologies used: ajax / javascript, php, sql, mysql, css, html.

skills used: programming, web design, graphic design