chris-alexander.com

URLS: www.sanjosemuseumofart.org/interactive and

www.sanjosemuseumofart.org/podcast/aotw

Parts: XHTML and CSS Development, PHP Hacking, Cloud Computing, RSS Development

SJMA Interactive Landing Page

SJMA Artist of the Week Podcast Page

Summary: Adding a page to the San Jose Museum of Art website is no easy task. What was required to make the two pages above work was a lot of hacking of the PHP code and tweaks to the CSS file. It’s difficult trying to stay within the confines set up by the original developers of the site.

The first page is a page that was created for the main purpose of acting as a landing page to our digital content. The museum has been actively building a large archive of audio and video around exhibitions and artwork which we wanted to make available to the public. The videos are embedded around the site on the various exhibition pages so they can be difficult to find. By going to the Interactive page you can quickly access which exhibitions have media content available. Additionally the page has images culled from the SJMA Flickr group and various ways to access our content, i.e. iTunes, YouTube, Flickr and plain old RSS feed, as well as a description of our iPod Touch Tour.

The second page was created in conjunction with our Artist of the Week PodCast which we created in November and December of 2006 for the exhibition New Year, New Gifts. The exhibition drew from the museum’s permanent collection and featured a lot of work that had recently come in. For the podcast we selected 8 works in the exhibit and each week for 8 weeks we delivered a new episode showcasing the artist of one of those works. My colleague, Lucy Larson, and I were fortunate enough to win a 2007 MUSE Award for the museum in the area of Extended Experience. This page utilized the web service Odeo to allow us to embed the audio on the page.

URL: www.chris-alexander.com/oldsite

Parts: XHTML and CSS Development, Graphic Design, minimal PHP script usage for “Contact” page

chris-alexander.com Home Page (Old Site)

chris-alexander.com (Old Site) presentations page

chris-alexander.com (Old Site) contact form

Summary: This was the first fully functioning site that I had for myself. Prior to this iteration I had basically used the chris-alexander.com URL as a playground for experimenting and learning about HTML and CSS. This version came about because of my need to have a site to allow people to access my presentation slides. I was speaking to the docents at the San Jose Museum of Art and felt that they might want to go back and see my presentation slides. I created the site in about a day and polished it up on the second day. There are aspects about it that I like and dislike.

I rather enjoy the minimal look and feel of it. I’m a lover of icons and it gave me the opportunity to utilize some that I found online in the menu on the right. It served it’s function by giving me the ability to connect, rather limitedly, with people that I presented to.

On the downside, everything on the site had to be hand-coded, unlike this new one which is driven by WordPress. While I enjoy hand-coding, by switching to WordPress I’m now able to focus on the content that I want to present. Also, the site did not use PHP includes to make updates easier. To make a correction to the navigation every page had to be updated for the change to take effect instead of updating one file.

URL: www.universalcitydentistry.com
Parts: Wireframing, UI Development, XHTML and CSS Development, Flash, Microformats

Screen shot from Universal City Dentistry

Summary: This site was developed as my final project in my Web Certification. For the project we had to find an actual person/business that needed a site. It is a business site for my friend who has a dental practice in Southern California with his wife. The site was developed as a multipage site and that is what was turned in as my project, however, when it went live, it did so as a single page site due to the time constraints around creating copy for the pages. I’m happy with how it turned out as a one-pager. There are a lot of features:

• Flash banner
• Text with several images
• Contact information with Microformats (for quick adding to addressbook)
• Contact form
• Embedded Google map
• Link to retrieve driving directions