SELECTED PORTFOLIO
Please note! The bulk of my development experience results from 2 years working for Essential Groove.com which is no longer in existence. I don’t have a place to put up a live version of the site for browsing/testing, but you may be able to see a limited number of pages at The Wayback Machine. Remember! The Wayback Machine sometimes garbles some of the images and whatnot, and is not a live site, but just an archive approximating what a site looked like at a certain time!
http://www.essentialgroove.com
(no longer in existence)
Essential Groove was a massive Amazon-style site that catered mostly to the DJ community selling records (yes, vinyl) and CDs. In its prime Essential Groove was the #3 retail DJ store site in the United States (by Alexa ranking). The site is no
longer in existence, and shut down due to the divorce of the
co-proprietors in addition to the business decision that DJ sales were heading more toward MP3s rather than vinyl. It should be noted that the site did not shut down due to financial reasons because the site was so intelligently designed that there was almost no overhead. The site was never advertised online or in print but grew to the #3 site entirely by word of mouth.
The site was entirely data driven in classic ASP. The original site
was developed with Dreamweaver but in the 2.5 years of developing the
site it became more and more custom-coded. I handled planning the details of the site, features, backend shopping cart and database, SQL, and design. All of the following were
aspects of the site that I developed:
- Cookie-based shopping cart (including SSL)
- Complex shipping system that included setting the shipping price in
the customer’s shopping cart based on their purchase, zip code, and
method of shipment, including international destinations
- Entire administration area that allowed many aspects of the site to
be operated by non-web savvy people including adding new product to the
site, changing prices, etc. - Complex search system allowing customer to search based on several
factors, for example "Show me the last three months worth of techno
releases, and sort them in reverse chronological order, but only
releases from Germany." - Essential Groove was a brick and mortar *and* online store, so a
simple database export and upload were all that was needed to keep the
online and in-store inventory synchronized - If we were out of stock on an item, I wrote a HTTP Query script to
access our suppliers’ inventory and show the item on our site as
"Available to Order" rather than "Out of Stock". This means that we
often had payment from the customer before we even had to order the
item from the distributor and didn’t have to turn down a sale when we were out of stock, but the distributors had it - Admin system also allowed any employee to fulfill an order, and the
site automatically generated an e-mail to the customer including the
UPS or Fedex tracking number - The customer could also login and check the status of any pending orders, and see links to track any current shipments
- All the site’s numerous bestseller lists were dynamically
generated, so the entire site was basically updated with a simple daily
database upload
- The company also released its own records and distributed a group
of record labels internationally so I often designed logos for
affiliated record labels - I also did all of the graphic design on the site since we sold shirts, headphones, etc. also.
- More examples are available upon request
While this site was ASP driven, the foundation of the site lies in
embedded HTML code so I have been able to easily transfer my knowledge
into PHP, probably currently the most widely used technology for data
driven websites.
This is my own personal site, included here more for the design aspects rather than coding. It was originally to promote my various multimedia abilities including music and web/graphic design. It runs on a simple hosted blog service called Typepad but the design is by me. It is also useful to note I have multiple domains including email forwarding to one site. (DNS configuration experience, etc.)
Most recently I’ve started a cute little site called Whenaissance, which is meant to be a play on the word "Renaissance". This site is where I occasionally post humorous or offbeat and artsy stories. The publishing platform is WordPress, but I started it mostly to experiment in CSS and PHP. The design is supposed to be very minimal and understated with some subtle touches. Of course, I also configured the site using cPanel.
My graphic design work on all sites have given me a thorough knowledge of photoshop as well. Additional photoshop examples are available upon request.
