Portfolio

At Ventura County Computers, our parent company, the primary design criteria was that the site had to be able to keep order out of more than 100 pages (the site isn't there yet, but it's designed for it). For this reason, the menuing system is more complicated than some other sites of the same size, with sub-menus only visible when you click on the main page. On some pages, the boxes on the right become sub-menus while on others they advertise merchandise for sale or provide definition of terms. This required a three-column layout. And I wanted to use rounded corners on all shapes (nearly impossible using old-fashioned layout techniques). We wanted to keep some design elements from the previous page, so the picture of Roxy (the dog) -- recently replaced by a picture of Rick's baby, Esai, and the VCC banner are retained as was the color-scheme.

Lauterbach & Associates wanted a website that would expand as their list of clients and projects expanded. They also wante a site that looked elegant and clean. The 4 small pictures at the top are entries to a drop-down menu system that hides most of the clutter, but still makes navigating easy. The FYI column on the home page chages frequently to provide fresh information to clients and prospects, while improving search engine rankings by having frequent changes to information at the top of the site.

The Lake Casitas Recreation Area has more than 400 campsites and they wanted to include pictures of every campsite, plus tons of other goodies. And the information had to be updatable by staff quickly and easily. The pages are plain html with no scripting, so staff can use Macromedia Contribute to make changes to content but cannot accidentally change formatting, menus, etc. The total site has over 500 pages, contains a Flash slide show on the home page and yet is simple enough for staff to maintain without having to pay for outside support.

The Lions Club District that encompasses Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties (4-A3) wanted a site to communicate with the 38 member clubs covering a large, diffuse area. Naturally, they wanted all the forms the clubs submit to be included, but they also wanted the district roster to be available to district officers and contact information to be available to the public. If you click on "District Roster" you will see live data -- the entire district database is online, with the public invited to view only the contact information. District officers, naturally, can view all the data when traveling. More importantly, they are looking at the same data. It used to be that officers wouldn't always update their database when a new one was distributed. Incidentally, the "Find a Club" search is of live data also.

The Channel Islands PC Users Group needed a site that could be easily maintained by a number of people. Their webmistress does most of the updating but some committee chairmen update their own pages. They wanted a uniform look and feel despite the number of contributors.

Incidentally, the background image of Anacapa in the Channel Islands has long been the club's logo, but in previous designs was always a space-consuming graphic on each page. By including it as a background image in CSS, we achieved the dual purpose of preserving content space and getting it outside the reach of accidental deletion by committee editors.

This design won first place (tie) in the large club division at the Association of PC Users Groups 2005 convention in competition with user groups from 25 nations.

Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer had a site that looked decent, but was too difficult to maintain. We kept the basic look of the old site, cleaned it up a bit, added some pictures and features and then modularized it so Pastor Brian Elster and staff could make changes more easily than in the past. We created the nested archive menus that are out of sight, but keep all the old Pastor messages available.

Staff can now keep the calendars and messages up to date without blowing something up.

The Casitas Store provides a long list of goods and services for the campers at Lake Casitas, near Ojai, California. Campers can call ahead and order supplies for their visit and have them ready when they arrive. Naturally they wanted to show some of the beauty of Lake Casitas while doing all this.

The Oxnard Noontimers Lions Club (Rick and Toby are members) is a member of the Lions District 4-A3. Their board is able to view live data, but only of Noontimer members. The rest of the data is not available. Both the District and Noontimer pages have their calendar of events on the home page because this is the main item members check into the site for.

Incidentally, no Javascript is used on the site -- even for the popup menu descriptions (hover the mouse over one of the menu items to see the effect).

This is Toby's family page. Because each link goes to another site (or at least another completely different design), we were able to use darker colors than one would on a larger site and experiment with some interesting effects. There are no visible graphics on the page until you hover the mouse over one of the menu items. Nope. Not a single GIF image. Nor is any Javascript used. The popup pictures are created entirely in CSS and HTML.

Unless you are well-versed in web page design, none of this will be of any great interest to you, except that all this hocus-pocus means that the pages will display properly in anything, even a PDA, and will load rapidly for users on slow connections.