Saturday, July 08, 2006

Site Launches

I've been very busy these days helping some folks out with their web sites. I've finally launched a few, with a few more yet to come or be completed.

A.D. Maddox Gallery
My first "e-commerce" web site -- I'm having all kinds of fun figuring out how to modify a PHP based shopping cart that is a free download. The third install had to be done by the host (InMotion Hosting) to get the secure server to work correctly. Which means all the work I did to upload products and modify the UI on the second install had to be redone. The first cart system I tried, Zen-cart, was a piece of work. After uploading an update, I could no longer assign quantities. And it never went to a secure server to log in . The shopping cart site still probably needs another 10-15 hours of work, including links from the site that is live. We're still working out how to handle shipping of products so varied that going by weight alone just ain't gonna cut it.

The Cottage Photographer
I met Jennifer Stanton through a friend of her boyfriend at the time. Her original site had been done on a trade, but after the wedding the site languished. The slide shows were thrown together with another free PHP download, this one is a lazy-man script: just throw everything in a directory, list the file names in order if you want in a text file, and the script does the rest. Only problem is very little is controllable, and it didn't integrate very well with the rest of the site. So I switched to Flash. I still have two more galleries to add and another magazine spread.

Mark Gamba Photographs
I got introduced to Mark by a friend who had known him in New York. Mark wanted the universe when it came to a web site: fast loading, huge images that couldn't be downloaded anonymously, and a page that filled any browser's acreage. User-controlled slide show option without thumbnails. A registration process. The old site had been done in Zope. I could not find anyone who knew how to use Zope, and after trying unsuccessfully to install it on my Mac using Gnu and the Unix equivalent of DOS, I gave up. The host eventually shut down, which gave us a chance to start from scratch. We decided on Inmotion Hosting, which has been great. I hired out some of the coding for the registration functionality. I wish I could design AND program. Few can do both well.

The Wild Bunch Ranch
I met these guys while living in Wyoming. I hadn't done any interface updating since y2k. Nuff said.

I still have to fix up what was formerly the Cajun Babes, and is now CZ and the Bon Vivants. And my own web site, megabite.com. It's a little embarassing, but I just don't have time to keep it up to date.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home