Web Design and Development

One of the sites I worked on in the last month or so has launched. The Ann Arbor Board of Realtors were looking to redesign their current site and Inner Circle Media was the firm that they felt would do it right. Luckily this was while I was working in their office and they graciously let me do the front-end development for the project.

I loved creating this site, its a great design especially compared to the other Realtor web sites that I have seen when googling to check out the competition. Not only was the design the reason I loved creating this site, but because of the fact I was able to create it as a flexible width layout. Throughout my freelance career the designers have always created fixed width designs but I felt that this site could be created flexible and not have any serious issues with the design and the great people at Inner Circle were all for it. The site is also built with Ruby on Rails and Inner Circle even created a custom content management system, so the board can easily update their site content and it gives them a lot of cool modules that make it a great data driven site.

They told me that the Board of realtor’s all over the country have a competition each year for who has the best website, hopefully with such a great design, use of great front-end techniques and such a powerful back-end based on rails will put the Ann Arbor Board of Realtors at the top of the list.

Well, its been a while since I have posted on a regular basis. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks that will change, but I have been transitioning into a new full time job as the lead front-end developer at Niche Retail, an ecommerce company that has about 18 different niche product sites.

I will be involved with many things including bringing the sites up to date with standards, which looks like its going to be a long process since it’s 18 or so sites. I will also be involved with more then just the coding but also be involved with the whole development process including new innovative ideas, usability, interaction design and all that great stuff.

It was my first week and I have already met with all the executives and checked out the main warehouse. We even already had a company party playing whirly ball, so yeah its been a big week for me. The development team is just three of us located in a small office in Ann Arbor Michigan while the main headquarters is located in Sylvan Lake Michigan. The work environment is very laid back and everyone is really nice. This is the type of job I have been waiting for and hope to do some great things.

Lately I haven’t been going on digg as much, but today I was checking it and found this great article on 53 CSS techniques you can’t live without. Its a great resource for any project your working on if you need some ideas on certain techniques. Check it out!

As you can see I have done a little redesign. I’m happy with it but I think I might try something else in a month or two, I just wanted to get an updated look and feel to the site. I haven’t updated the site since my portfolio class and it was looking pretty old school! I don’t do much design work any more, hopefully this can motivate me to start messing around more with layouts and everything since I’m always reading all the blogs on certain techniques or what not.

There are still be some bugs, so I will be looking for them. If you notice any please let me know. I hope you guys like it and feel free to leave any constructive criticism. I’m not completely happy with how everything turned out so I won’t be offended. Its a great improvement to what I previously had and glad I had some time to not be lazy and actually get it up here.

I haven’t been posting a lot lately, well simply because I just haven’t been to inspired to write about much going on. I have been working on a lot of new things for my career in the near future and hope to update you guys all that in a couple of weeks.

With all the talk and hype about Apple’s new iPhone, Cameron Moll wrote an article describing his thoughts on what the iPhone will do for the mobile web. What better person to tell us what they think then the person leading the field in mobile web development and in the process of writing a book on it.

I would get the phone if it were going to be made for Verizon but of course its for Cingular so no chance in me getting it anytime soon. I just don’t like so much of this hype about the end of desktop computers and all.

UPDATE:
Jeff Croft post some great reasons why Apple is blowing all the other Cell Phone manufacturers out of the water and that they won’t be able to catch up. He predicts that the iPhone isn’t being released for six months because it is going to be running OS X Leopard. After reading this article I would say his points are correct and no one will be able to top Apple or come close.