The owners are really good friends of mine, and we have been working on this site for awhile.  We designed all of the pages of the site to match the look of some of their favorite album covers.  There is a lot of image replacement that occurs on the site to match the album design, while still allowing indexable content for search engines and screen readers.

I am really happy with how the site came out and its character helps to accentuate the business that Dave and Juniper have created over the past 7 years.

I helped to organize the content that he currently had and integrate it into a WordPress installation for ease of maintenance by not so “tech-savy” users.  I modified the original theme by adding a jQuery image preview of all of their properties as part of the site’s header.  I also integrated the properties to be dynamically pulled together on the properties page and made use of post meta-data to determine what extra amenities each property had.

I used embedded Google map information for allowing site visitor’s to quickly map directions to Put-in-Bay from any source.

Finally, we decided on a new domain name to use to avoid confusion and settled on islandclubvillarentals.com (we also have islandclubvilla.com).  I then setup his pages to use SEO keywords and descriptions, setup his sitemap.xml and robots.txt file, hooked his site into Google Analytics for stat tracking, and even setup a quick Google AdWords campaign to help get him on his feet with web traffic.

The project was based around design, ease of use, and trying to get rid of the stigma that e-learning has to be the same old boring thing.

My role was to create the entire application from scratch, using only still photo mock-ups. This involved chopping out the assets, integrating them into Flash or HTML, adding appropriate animations, and tweaking the design as functionality and usability were introduced… and that’s just to get the artwork into the project.

• I built the application with a PHP and MySQL backend to handle all of the server side functionality.
• There is a CRON job that calculates client statistics every few hours so we have an idea of how the system is being operated.
• There is a PHP class for dynamically developing PDF files for course certificates which I integrated into the system.
• System alerts are delivered using jQuery in a Growl-like fashion.
• Part of the admins side is a Flex-based application for creating quiz pools, including picture uploads, that can be randomly drawn from during quizzes on the user side.

The project was a great learning experience and helped solidify larger project ideals, such as how to handle continued feature and support requests, how to take a project from design to web, and how to best manage the available resources for the project.