Sunday, August 2, 2009

Website in 5 days (or, my brain hurts)

Whew—what a weekend.

After working with Concrete5 for a few days I realized that the design I wanted to produce for Proteus Creative was much more ambitious than my skillset within the new CMS could provide—at least, within the timeframe I wanted the site to be in existence (i.e. yesterday). So I did something I rarely do—I set up a compromise, or a preview site.

Head over and take a look: www.proteuscreative.com

Internet Explorer users beware! I've only tested it in the Macintosh browsers so far. Though comments and critiques are welcome if you spot something that doesn't seem to work right.

It's designed to be a halfway point between a splash page and the whole site that I have planned. Basically, it's enough to let clients know I exist and show them the best of what I do. It should be enough to get a few freelance gigs here and there.

Though the design is simple, it is running on a full Concrete5 system, with a few modified javascript/php blocks I've implemented. Some of them took a little twisting, but it all seems to work the way I want it to (again, at least in Mac Safari and Firefox).

From design concept to finished upload, the whole thing took about five days—most of it being done on the weekend. Today and yesterday were a blur, as I head my head fully… well, stuck in concrete.

But now it's there, and I've already learned a lot. Now at least this can bide me some time to actually sharpen my skills and work towards implementing the big fish.

Enjoy!

1 comment:

  1. On my Macbook, I have to scroll down a few inches in order to see any of the clickable content; this is a bit annoying. But overall it's a very nice site, and the portfolio examples are great. Are there any plans to go live with that Drupal version of the Arcosanti website? It looks great!

    That website, by the way, is kind of my baby: I founded it back in the spring of '95. At the time, I couldn't get any of the management to agree that we needed a website -- none of them really had an inkling of what the internet was -- so I did it as a rouge operation, under the usual Arco assumptions that it's easier to apologize than to ask permission. Bought my own 28.8k modem, and spent five feverish days designing, coding, and publicizing it. Tomiaki only found out a few weeks later, when I casually mentioned that we'd had a couple of workshop registrations from online. By then, of course, there was no going back.

    Anyhow, I was the caretaker of the website for a couple of its generations, and then the role moved on to Rob, then Jeff, and now it's miles beyond where I left it, which is great -- kind of like watching your baby grow up, I suppose. That teaser of a design in your portfolio looks like it would be a very worthy next step.

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