Busy Boy

Around June or so, my friend Scott Priddy had asked me to design the website for his new company, Honest Project. That turned into designing the software he and his partner had been working on.

In September, Scott hired me full-time and I’ve been doodling in Photoshop and coding HTML/CSS around the clock ever since.

What is Honest Project?

We make the home construction process less risky, and more efficient for all participants; lenders, home owners, builders, even sub-contractors and vendors. They will all have access to the software, bringing much needed transparency and clarity to the construction industry. I could go into more detail, but would rather show you pretty pictures.

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The home page was designed wanting to sell the fact that Honest Project’s objective is to serve the construction community, not just one particular part of it. We want all participants to find value in the solution.

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To further our commitment to community, I designed and developed the Honest Project Community site (built with Wordpress). All of our training  documents, release notes, as well as industry-related articles will be posted here. Eventually, the Community site will expand to include project portfolios, displaying information on Honest Project participants and projects they worked on.

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Finally, when users login to the actual software, they’ll find a clean and open layout that allows for a large amount of content without feeling cluttered.

We’re looking for lenders and builders, so if you know of anyone involved with home construction, please send them my way and I would be happy to demonstrate the software for them.

Wish me luck on the new job!

Independently owned and operated, CarpentryAustin.com needed a way to stand out among their competitors.

Carpenters aren’t exactly known for their marketing expertise, but CarpentryAustin.com owener, Les O’Rourke, has been a welcome contradiction to this assumption. I love having a client that shares ideas that actually are helpful and make sense. It was a perfect, open discussion on how to draw traffic to the website and turn that traffic into customers.

It started with a re-design of the CarpentryAustin.com logo, which I thought the client would immediately resist. On the contrary, he actually supplied the inspiration for the angle in the new logo. The more I worked with Les (no pun intended), the more I realized, instead of applying his creative eye used for his unique carpentry, he was now applying it to the web design discusions.

Take a look at the site and see just how creative a carpenter can be.

After months of work and cross-browser issues, the website for my first client, Lutheran Foundation of Texas, is up.

For them being my first client ever, this was a huge project to take on. There was a large amount of content and the amount of pages required a horizontal dropdown menu, which was done using CSS. Some light JavaScript was required to get the dropdown to function in IE6. Most of the code for the menu was learned through Eric Shepherd’s article on Hybrid CSS Dropdowns published by A List Apart.

Take a look around lfot.org and let me know what you think.

The Stubby Studios blog is finally working. I’ve been so busy with the Lutheran Foundation of Texas website and other projects that I haven’t been able to nurture Stubby Studios as needed.

Visit the portfolio page to see other examples of my work built with hand-coded XHTML and CSS.

Take a look around and feel free to leave a comment.

Check out the new trick at the-bests.net.

Change the entire layout of the page by selecting either of the new buttons provided at the top of the page. The technique was provided as open source back in 2001 by Paul Sowden in an article he wrote for A List Apart. Since then, the style switching technique has gone on to increase accessibility and fun across the Web.

You’ll also see the style switcher used on a site I am creating for Lutheran Foundation of Texas. Many of the visitors for LFOT’s website are not aware that modern browsers are capable of increasing default font sizes, so with the style switching JavaScript I was able to provide a feature allowing users to increase the font size with the touch of a button. The same feature has popped up on many government and college websites since the technique was presented in 2001. The new Lutheran Foundation of Texas site will go live in January and will be featured here at Stubby Studios as part of my portfolio.