Jan 07

Discover Thyself / Earlham College

Discover Thyself featuring the Discern-o-Matic QuizDis­cover Thy­self is a “dis­cern­ment” site for Quaker teens. Spon­sored by Earl­ham Col­lege, it fea­tures resources, videos and the all-new “Discer-o-Matic Quiz.”

The design is all orig­i­nal. We went through six rounds of the con­cept design mock­ups made up on Adobe Fire­works. Because the site is built on Word­Press used as a CMS, Earl­ham Col­lege staff was able to add and arrange con­tent even before the design cod­ing began. The site uses the excel­lent The­matic theme, a blank tem­plate that allows for quite sophis­ti­cated designs using Action Hooks and com­plete CSS markup.

The most excit­ing ele­ment of the site is the “Discern-o-Matic” quiz, which takes users through a series of ques­tions. At the end the ques­tions are reor­ga­nized and pre­sented to the user to help them under­stand what it is they want to do. The quiz is pow­ered using the open-source LimeSur­vey. Results are out­putted via a cus­tom PHP script that polls the LimeSur­vey data­base and out­puts in a nicely-worded and for­mat­ted Word­Press results page. The tem­plates for Lime Sur­vey were altered to mim­ick the look of the rest of the site; the aver­age user won’t notice the pass-off from Word­Press to Lime Sur­vey and back to WordPress.

In hopes the quiz might go viral, indi­vid­ual results are saved on a unique URL. Users are invited to share their results page via Facebook.

Visit Site: http://​www​.dis​cover​thy​self​.org

Mar 29

ReconRabbi​.net

ReconRabbiReconRabbi is a social net­work for rab­bis asso­ci­ated with the Recon­struc­tion­ist Rab­bini­cal Col­lege. It is designed to pro­vide ongo­ing edu­ca­tion and net­work­ing for far-flung alumni.
It’s a highly cus­tomized, member-only site built on the Ning plat­form. The typ­i­cal Ning fea­tures are here: video, pod­casts and mem­ber pro­files. Expanded areas include exten­sive train­ing mate­r­ial for mem­bers. We recorded and I edited a series of eight screen­casts of approx­i­mately five min­utes each for their Help sec­tion using Screen­flow for Mac; top­ics include sign­ing up, adding dis­cus­sions, using the cus­tomized train­ing mate­r­ial.
Member-only Site: http://​www​.reconrabbi​.net/.

Sep 12

FWCC Google Maps Mashup

FWCC Google Maps MashupThe Friends World Com­mit­tee for Con­sul­ta­tion unites Quak­ers of all stripes together in joint projects and dia­log. It’s Amer­i­cas office has the most com­plete list­ing of U.S. and Cana­dian Friends Meet­ings and Churches and now has a map to prove it!
This is a mash-up of the FWCC data­base with Google Maps.

Because of lim­i­ta­tions of how many data points Google can show the coun­tries have been divided into regions. The main access page is a screen shot of a Google Map with a old fash­ioned imagemap over­lay that allows you to select the region you want to look at. Javascript good­ness shad­ows the cur­rently selected region.

See it live: www​.fwc​camer​i​cas​.org/​f​r​i​e​nds

Jul 28

Alliance Cemetery

Alliance CemeteryI was hired to redesign the web­site of a ceme­tery that rep­re­sents a fas­ci­nat­ing slice of South Jer­sey his­tory. In the 1880s, a group of Jews escaped Russ­ian pogroms, came to Amer­ica and started a “return to the soil” move­ment that led to the estab­lish­ment of an agri­cul­tural colony in the small Salem County cross­roads of Norma, New Jer­sey. Before long they estab­lished Alliance Cemetery.

The new Alliance web­site high­lights the entrance gate. The ceme­tery has hired a sur­vey­ing com­pany to do a detailed map of the plots and we hope to add this in with a Google Maps mash-up when the data becomes avail­able. A detailed his­tory and pho­tos are also in the works.

The design is hand-coded from scratch and is prob­a­bly the most taste­ful design of my port­fo­lio. The pages them­selves are editable by the client using Cushy­CMS and the Direc­tions page has an inte­grated Google Map.

Visit: Alliance​Ceme​tery​.com