Neil Pie

The Link

The Project

The purpose of this site was simple, to provide an upcoming gig listing, a contact form, an MP3 player and links to the various social networking sites that the band are involved in. Expandability was key, with future plans to incorporate photo galleries and online sales to be kept in mind.

After stripping the content down to its bare essentials, I decided that anything other than a single page would be unnecessary. A sense of ‘web-site’ rather than ‘web-page’ was created by spreading the content across a large area and using an up/down auto-scrolling navigation.

The Flavours needed a site to reflect their DIY eithic, but one that also captured their individuality and irreverent sense of fun. The minimal use of colour and the use of ‘courier’ and hand-drawn fonts kept the site ‘lo-fi’, and the strong areas of black/white contrast create a striking visual effect, especially when flying past the screen on the auto-scroll.

The Geek Stuff

Site management needed to be kept as simple as possible for the guys, so the ‘random player’ (hats off to premiumbeat for the OS love) is based on a PHP script that picks a random mp3 file that has been uploaded into a perticular directory on the server, and then grabs all the other info necessary from the metatags of the file.

The gig guide reads from a spreadsheet uploaded to the same directory, and automatically wipes any listings that are in the past.

Obviously a big helping of JQuery and associated plugins, the detail of which I’ll go into at a later point.

Peace.

The Link

The project

I was approached by John (the Chippy!) of JTC Carpentry & Construction for a minimal website that would cement his online presence a little, to work alongside his Trust-a-trader profile and facebook pages.

John came up with the logo himself, from which the concept for the site design wasn’t too much of a giant leap.

Quite specifically after a minimal site design, all John wanted was the a page with some information about his company (that he could edit himself), a contact form and a gallery area, to which he could upload images with captions.

The Geek Stuff

The site has been built using Wordpress as a content management system (CMS), and my own WP configuration which will allow John to expand the site at a later date should he decide it is appropriate, and I’ve also made use of JQuery and a bunch of plugins, more details on those later…

I’ve based the WP theme around HTML5, but had to buckle a little bit to get the lightbox effect to work correctly, although with a little more attention I think this will run fine with the new HTML 5 block level element as opposed to the generic <div> containers. I’ve also implemented a little bit of PHP based browser sniffing to leave the Javascript off mobile devices, as the MopBox didn’t seem to translate so well to the smaller screen. That’s one for the to-do list right there.

Safe.