D & E Entertainment

June 24th, 2010 // 10:24 pm @ Doron

The good folks at the renown specialty film distribution company, D & E Entertainment were in need of an overhaul to their WordPress web site. The name of the game here was to set them up with a web site that would showcase their formidable body of work and allow for multiple ways for fans to find screenings and purchase merchandise from their films.  It was also crucial that the site be extremely flexible and simple to update while clearly expressing the company’s existing branding.

Project highlights:

• Porting over the site’s extensive existing content into a brand new premium WordPress theme
• Creating a system of mini-sites within the web site allowing each film to have a page with a unique background image, primary banner, movie poster, image gallery, movie trailer, and pretty much whatever else was needed to provide film fans with an individually branded experience. Each mini-site was set up in a way that was extremely quick and simple so that within minutes, non-technical personnel could set up a great-looking custom mini site.
• With the click of a checkbox and nothing more, selected mini-sites were set to automatically display in a special “Past Events” page showcasing D & E’s various projects all in one simple and intuitively laid-out page. At the top of the page was an iTunes-album cover-like interface allowing users to quickly locate the film that they wanted to learn more about.
• A “Theatres and Tickets” page was set up so that D & E personnel could easily enter the dates, times, locations, URLs, and any other pertinent information into WordPress’s user control panel (aka, “the admin”), and those screenings would appear on a clickable Google map showing the precise locations for each screening, with the pertinent information below. All screening were easily searchable by city or zip code as well, making it supremely easy for users to locate the screening nearest them.
• E-Commerce was set up using the Shopp plugin, allowing D & E staff to quickly and easily add, edit, and remove products from their online store.
• D & E’s multiple social media profiles were clearly tied into the site
• Integration with MailChimp for email marketing.

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Category : Featured Work &Portfolio

Glow 2010 Website

February 28th, 2010 // 6:22 pm @ Doron

To promote Glow, the utterly massive art event held on the Santa Monica beach which in 2008 attracted 200,000 people, interactive agency Seso Media Group was charged with creating a new website that could be updated at a moment’s notice. Naturally, WordPress was the perfect fit. My job was to take Seso’s designs (in PSD format) and apply them to the new WordPress site.

The project required:

• A large photo gallery of 2008′s event, very easily update-able by non-technical personnel
• A blog
• Documentation on how to make regular updates
• Setting up a temporary gallery site while the main site was being built
• Signup form for email updates

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Category : Featured Work &Portfolio

Mendocino Beauty

January 31st, 2010 // 7:38 pm @ Doron

My design compadre, Shona Lepis of Eye Design Studio created a sublime design for the sumptuously splendid makeup and hair mavens at Mendocino Beauty. I was responsible for translating Shona’s impeccable design into a site that would be easily update-able by the client while at the same time flexible enough to include a variety of different layouts for the various sections of the site.

Just a few of the items this project required:

• A homepage slideshow that the client could update and also enter the text to be overlaid on top of each slide
• Multiple pages with banners along the top which the client could update by uploading new photos and adding new text to be overlaid on top of the banner
• A blog
• A photo gallery that the client could easily update themselves via point-and-click (no FTP or any madness like that!)
• Sidebar content that varied from page to page
• Multiple social media and email sharing links
• Automatic page redirects to keep Google-indexed pages from their old site pointing correctly to the new site

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Category : Featured Work &Portfolio

Joe Settineri

October 20th, 2009 // 8:26 am @ Doron

LML Music recording artist Joe Settineri needed a website to coincide with the launch of his new album “Stay.” Joe had a very specific look and feel he was going for with his website which required a fixed-height layout and a different photographic background of nearly all of the pages. The challenge was to create a site using the ever-popular and simple-to-manage WordPress platform to build a site that looked very different than most WordPress sites.

Additionally the site required:

• A signup form for Joe’s email newsletter
• Links to purchase Joe’s album on either iTunes or Amazon.com
• The ability to make regular news updates
• A photo gallery easily update-able and sortable by Joe
• An audio player to preview Joe’s music
• A link to Joe’s Facebook profile
• Various informational pages easily editable by Joe

The end result was one that Joe totally hated it…KIDDING (of course), he was very happy with it and got lots of great feedback. You can read more about the final result on the Testimonials page.

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Category : Featured Work &Portfolio

Rent.com Moving Center

October 19th, 2009 // 10:28 pm @ Doron

Rent.com (an eBay company) is the #1 most visited website in the United States for rental properties (apartments, condos, houses, etc). One crucial part of Rent.com’s website is their moving center which helps renters with their relocation efforts.

This project involved taking the designs from Rent.com’s design group and implementing them using XHTML, CSS, jQuery, and HTML Mason (PERL). For you non-geeks, that probably means nothing, but suffice it to say that this was a very complex project that receives a high amount of traffic, since Rent.com receives millions of visitors each month. Because of this, any code that’s developed on the website must be of the very highest standards of excellence, since multi-browser compatibility (Internet Explorer 6,7,8, Firefox 2&3, Safari, etc) and fast-loading times can make the difference of tens of thousands of dollars per month. It was an honor to take on the responsibility of building such an important part of one of the internet’s major players.

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Category : Featured Work &Portfolio

J.Perlman R.Lutge Photography

October 19th, 2009 // 9:48 pm @ Doron

This particular project was a WordPress photo blog built with Magnetic Webworks partner Shona Lepis of Eye Design Studios (who represents the design arm of Magnetic Webworks). Shona worked with the client to create a photo blog that would be SEO-friendly (in other words, no Flash), very attractive, and easy to update with no FTP’ing necessary. In this case, Shona submitted her gorgeous PSD layout and I translated the design into clean, to-the-pixel, semantic XHTML and created a custom jQuery plugin for the homepage image rotator. Also modified the WordPress back end to allow client to easily select categories and photo collections to feature on the homepage. Created smoothly-sliding comments box for each blog entry, also using jQuery.

This project required:

• A customized Flash-like homepage image rotator with accompanying caption text
• An easy way for the client to feature any category the wanted to feature on the homepage with accompanying text and description
• A Twitter Feed
• Link to Facebook
• Multiple social media and email sharing links
• Various informational pages easily update-able by the client
• Various SEO plugins
• Automated site backups

Fortunately, both Shona and the client were super-happy with the outcome and Shona and I continue to collaborate on projects for both Magnetic Webworks and Eye Design Studios.

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Category : Featured Work &Portfolio

Mary Kay Cocharo

October 18th, 2009 // 4:02 am @ Doron

Reknown Los Angeles marriage and family therapist Mary Kay Cocharo needed a website that she could easily update to highlight her popular workshops in addition to easily updating every other page on the site. She also needed something that would be SEO-friendly and match her serene and nurturing brand.

The site also required:

• A relationship quiz that Mary Kay could easily update herself
• An audio greeting
• A homepage slideshow featuring images that added life to the site and illustrated her brand
• A signup form for Mary Kay’s email newsletter
• A section for regular news and informational updates
• Various informational pages easily update-able by Mary Kay
• A contact form

The result was that Mary was able to fortify her email newsletter with a living-breathing organism of a website that was current and appealing to her target market. You can read more about Mary’s experiences on the Testimonials page.

Click here to peruse the rest of my portfolio.

Category : Featured Work &Portfolio