A collaboration with Bill Tomczak of Grumpy Engineering, this site for Vermont company, Portabrace, was an interesting challenge all the way around. Their prior site was a cumbersome custom cms which set up each variation of a product as a separate product (4 tee-shirt products: one design in S, M, L and XL.) Searching for a case for a camera returned too many results, with tiny thumbnails and nearly identical descriptions.

We set out to build a site from the ground up, with a custom component for Joomla 1.7 that would improve the customer's experience and streamline the client's data entry and maintenance. We had to maintain existing sku numbers, but were able to group products in families and provide details of the differences on one family page, with dropdowns to select the right product to add to a shopping cart. We reduced the number of pages to maintain from over 900 to around 240 while providing a better shopper experience with multi-facetted product search and "refine your search" tools.

While we were at it, we used a responsive design that would work well on phones and ipads -- they sell a case for video crews to use an ipad on the job, why not make a site that would perform well on the smaller touch screen? Html5 video runs on those ipads and iphones, too!

Phase one of the project produced a user friendly site and gave the client tremendous power to manage changes and updates. Phase two is coming with some additonal functions for both end user and manager.

Martha came to me for strategy help in establishing a brand new web presence. She knew she wanted a website with a blog and a facebook page, but she didn't know she could also have a site that would work well on all kinds of devices or how much fun she'd have learning new skills. The site, MarthaMoravec.com, is built with WordPress, starting with the Responsive Twenty Ten child theme. She choose a few Google fonts and a few stock photos to make the blog section distinctive.

Check this one out on your phone or ipad, or just change the width of your browser window and see how responsive it is!

Michael Millard at Froggy Bottom Guitars makes some of the finest handbuilt steel string acoustic guitars in the world. What's unique is that he makes individual guitars for individual players - and he knows how to listen to the player describe what they want - and then he builds it!

This new website has been a long time in coming, but it reflects that same quality of being based on a lot of listening to the client to determine what he needed and wanted - and then delivering all that he wanted and more! 

I was contacted by the development director of Youth Services about a new website for the organization that assists individuals with problems ranging from the challenges associated with growing up to homelessness, to substance abuse or trouble with the law. Their old static html site had served its purpose for many years, but now they wanted to be able to add new content, edit content and manage the site on their own. They wanted other functionality that a Content Management System would provide and we decided on Joomla!

Joomla!'s blog structure allows them to create new content in multiple sections that can be immediately available to the public without having to revisit the menu structure. Sidebar modules present profiles, sign up forms, donation links and a mini calendar tied to a list of events which can be managed by multiple staff members. The development director is hopeful that other members of the staff will manage sub-sections of the site leaving her to focus on fund-raising and development.

Marilyn Allen, like most visual artists these days, needed a web presence to supplement her exposure through teaching opportunities and gallery shows. Marilyn learned to optimize her images for the web, to upload the images to the web server and to edit page and caption text. The ease of front end Joomla! editing and Ignite Gallery backend image management means she'll be able to manage and maintain the site and add new images as she goes, but spend most of her time on her painting!

Annie Tiberio Cameron - Photography Annie is a terrific photographer, and photography instructor and needed to be able to show off her work. An old static html site was impossible to maintain and languished for many years until she had a chance to get some help from her daughter and finally get the photos into the right formats and sizes for the web. That was the time consuming part. Uploading them into the Ignite Gallery on her new Joomla! site was easy!

The Newfane Country Store, in Newfane, Vermont is now online!  A favorite stopping point for visitors to Vermont, the store now makes its wares available through a Squirrelcart E-commerce solution.   With the intentionally simple design by Meg McCarthy, I developed the Squirrelcart theme and assisted the owners in setting up their store.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency had a static html site that had grown to thousands of page, even more pdfs, and a bunch of custom applications.  They decided to remake the site in Joomla! and put out an RFP for custom template or templates and some help with a custom module to generate links for sidebar boxes.  I was part of a team that submitted a bid for this project and I led the template work, combining their 5 different layouts into one template that dynamically assigns the right column widths and module positions depending on the section of the site or a K2 extra field that could be used to trigger the widest content area possible.  Each section needed to be styled with a different color scheme for the navigation and this was accomplished by adding a few lines of code in the head of the template and a variable on a containing div.

Susan Bull Riley, Fine Artist Susan wanted a portfolio site that she could maintain herself.  I chose Ignite Gallery for Joomla! for it's excellent backend interface, better than ever in the new version 2.5, AND the many options for presenting the galleries.  Most options are set in the admin section, while a few customizations required tweaking the javascript.  Susan didn't need to know about all of that -- she got to say what she wanted and to learn to create categories, upload images and enter / edit text.  She is indeed a fine artist, and surprised herself to be able to also work on her website!   It's a wonderful thing.

Gradualism and Addiction Treatment is a Word Press blog to share information, articles, and resources about an approach to addiction treatment that is centered on trying to create a therapeutic continuum that builds on the strengths of both the harm reduction and abstinence approaches, while trying to reduce their respective shortcomings. Dr. Scott Kellogg, PhD will add resources and articles to maintain this site.

Green Mountain Pressed Flowers is a business started by a colleague from my public school teaching days. Ellie Roden makes beautiful pressed flower art and sells reproductions in the form of cards and bookmarks. She also takes orders for custom artwork and sells the original pressed flower collages. She had a website, built by a friend, but no way to maintain it herself. The new site, built in Joomla! with Ignite Gallery2 gives her complete control over the content AND, she's now set up for online orders using a PayPal shopping cart.

The Spencer Hotel in Chautauqua, New York had a beautiful website, but it was a nightmare to maintain. It had been coded by another developer in tables, with images for all headings and was full of presentational code. I was hired for maintenance tasks but after time was able to convince the owner that the code of her site was not serving her. She loved the design so I offered her a Joomla! site that she'd be able to maintain with a custom template to more or less duplicate the original design. Now a Joomla! site, the hotel staff is able to add new specials and make other changes as needed.

Vermont Care For All is the web home for a benefit cd produced to raise funds for the Vermont Workers Center's Healthcare is a Human Right campaign. Sales of the benefit CD are handled by a PayPal account. Samples of all 10 tracks are available via a sidebar mp3 player.

Robert Johnson Guitar Styles DVD is not a new product, but a new site. It may look familiar (see Thunder's Mouth, below.) Guitarist Scott Ainslie loved the clean structure of his first "single-product" website and wanted to simply clone it for this one. An article by Scott will appear in the November issue of Acoustic Guitar and we wanted this new site up for the traffic the article will generate.

Vermont Woods Studios sells fine handcrafted furniture built in Vermont -- built-to-order designs from several manufacturers and one-of-a-kind pieces from artisan craftsmen. The site features a SquirrelCart e-commerce solution. Hundreds of products and thousands of options make this the most complex shopping cart IrisLines has produced so far. The blog, FurnitureQuest.com, wanted to give the new site the "Furniture Site of the Year Award". Read the Vermont Woods Studios' Press Release about the award.

New England Greenhouse Update is a project of the Floriculture department at the University of Massachusetts. They had a Word Press blog and a separate, html photo gallery which required manual creation of thumbnail images, and manual creation of links between the thumbnail and the large image. It was very cumbersome and didn't provide much in the way of searchability. Built in Joomla! with the topical image galleries generated as category blogs, the process of adding new content is much streamlined. Since each large photo and caption is an article and both photos and text "updates" are tagged with "Custom Properties" the whole site is very searchable. This project required custom template overrides, and clever implementation of Joomla! blog layouts. I worked with the developer to enhance the usability of the Custom Properties extension.

A.L. Tyler and Sons have been providing electrical, heating, ventilation and air conditioning services in the Brattleboro, Vermont area for over 40 years. This is their first website.

Sari Soldiers' filmmaker Julie Bridgham knew she needed a site that could be kept up to date -- she already had one that wasn't! -- and she liked what I had done for the filmmakers of Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Mathaai. This site is built in Joomla! which will give Julie the tools she needs to make changes -- if only her busy screening schedule allowed her time to do it!

Bill Oates and Heidi Bredfeldt are the Inn Consulting Partners. Their site advertises their services, inns for sale, and includes online registration and inquiry forms. The screenshot shows their new Joomla! site with random quotes, "blog" display of inn listings, news and "innsights", and an ever changing front page.

Thunder's Mouth: CD by Scott Ainslie: Scott read an e-book on building a site that will really sell cds and decided it was worth a try. He has a site that has information on all of his cds, book and dvd, but this one is just focused on the newest cd, Thunder's Mouth. It's built in Joomla and has an mp3 player to serve up samples of all of the tracks. There's lots of info about personnel, instruments, recording equipment, etc. but you're always taken back to the main path: see, listen, buy! It seems to be working.

Guilford Community Church: The Guilford Church has an active music program, youth program and things happening at the church just about every day of the year. They needed a site that could be easily updated and that could provide links to partners in their community outreach efforts. Built in Joomla! with capacity for lots of future development, the site has an events list calendar and mp3s of the choir!

Unity Church of Vermont: Unity of Vermont wanted a site that they could maintain themselves. They needed a calendar and a way to communicate with members and the public about events and classes at the Church. We build their site in WordPress and they're off an running, adding blog posts, pages and updating sidebar modules.

Hilltop Montessori: The Montessori School in Brattleboro has just purchased land and will be moving to a new campus in the fall of 2009. Their new website will keep everyone informed about the building project and the student's projects at their current location. The content mananagement system, Joomla!, provides the structure for a site they can update themselves and features image galleries, and other features.

Will Ackerman (no relation -- see that "r" in his name?) is a well known musician, producer and the founder of Windham Hill Records. His Joomla! site was designed to look a lot like his previous site, which he liked, but couldn't maintain. The site features an image gallery slideshow on the studio page, and random quote modules.

Transformational Chairwork Training is a WordPress site to announce training workshops, and share information and articles about a group of psychotherapy techniques. Dr. Scott Kellogg, PhD will add content and manage his "gig" calendar of events.

Penny Nichols needed a new website to promote and cell her recent book / cd project: . She already had a Joomla! site for the songwriting camps she runs, so we built this in Joomla! as well, with a SquirrelCart e-commerce solution which interfaces with her merchant account.

New England Fiddler and Folk Singer, Lissa Schneckenburger: Lissa had a new cd coming out, and wanted her site redesigned to celebrate the cd-release. The new standards based site replaces a frame and tables based site that was beautiful but didn't work well for search engines. We'll be watching to see Google pick up on the new site.  P.S.  Lissa has another new cd titled "Dance"  to accompany "Song"; as a companion CD, it shares graphic elements and we didn't have to re-do the site for this release - coming in September, 2010.

Taking Root: the Vision of Wangari Maathai: Marlboro, VT filmmakers Alan Dater and Lisa Merton have produced a film about Wangari, the Greenbelt Movement and grassroots democracy in Kenya -- ready for release just when the post-election violence broke out. The site features a flash introduction on the home page and a lightbox slideshow from the thumbnails on interior pages.

Irisbeads is the name of my glass bead and jewelry business. I melt glass in my basement to make beads, earrings, barrettes. The site is NOT a store, but has photos of products and the process of making these things. I sell at craft fairs and in a few brick and mortar stores in town.

Camp Takodah - YMCA Camp in Richmond, NH : a content management system site for a YMCA camp that allows staff to update pages and images easily. We've just released a revised and updated version and design for the camp.

Massachusetts Food Safety Education : I was hired to write the html and css for this site. The content already existed in pdfs and they wanted it available in html format that closely resembled the pdf graphics and layout.

The Clifftop Trilogy: traditional and original old-time fiddle tunes by acclaimed roots songwriter, fiddler and tunesmith Mark Simos. The Trilogy section of Mark's site was a small scale introduction for Mark to a content management system approach to web site development. A computer geek in a former life, Mark had built and maintained his own site (devachan.com) for many years, but knew it was time for an update and he wanted to feature the now complete trilogy on a more professional looking site. The custom Joomla! template does the job of providing a consistent appearance across the many pages about the Clifftop Trilogy recording project.

Mary Lea: Dance Fiddler: a site for a musician with a broad range of musical styles. MP3 samples of Mary's music are available on a page to help wedding planners identify what kind of music they want. Samples are also available on pages featuring Mary's many cd projects.

The John Harvey Gray Center for Reiki Healing : a collaborative project with designer Meg McCarthy, this site features class information and online registration, a PayPal store and mailing list sign up with Vertical Response.

Vintage MG for Sale : a one-page wonder for a friend's dad with a cool car for sale. A very cool chrome logo was done in PhotoShop!

Froggy Bottom Guitars : I took over maintenance on this established site. We're featuring new guitars regularly and a new front page monthly.

SummerSongs, Inc. : a Joomla site for a songwriter's community which includes e-commerce, registration, easy updating and a member-only area. This site uses a template that allows fixed or fluid width and gives the choice to the user.

Guy Wachtel, Fine Carpentry : a portfolio site for a craftsman / builder of custom kitchens, libraries, additions and renovations.

Scott Hausmann: Inspired Designs in Wood : a site rich in graphics: photographs of custom designed furniture and instruments.

Black Isle Music: Keith Murphy and Becky Tracy : a site for a couple of musicians who play in various groups. The site includes calendar, cds, pdfs of sheetmusic, and a small photo gallery.

Cattail Music: Scott Ainslie : a musician's website with calendar, lyrics, reviews, mp3 download, cd and video sales and articles on the history of the blues. A new SquirrelCart e-commerce solution was put in place to coincide with the release of Scott's latest CD, Thunder's Mouth. Scott also has a WordPress blog about cooking at cooking.cattailmusic.com.