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Review of Mediastar WordPress Portfolio Theme

We recently wrapped up development with SETX Digital on a website for a custom furniture builder in Southeast Texas using the Mediastar Portfolio WordPress theme and wanted to give a quick review of the theme and how we liked working with it. The theme has a lot of great features that allowed us to customize it and get the site up and looking great pretty quickly. However, our takeaway from the entire project is that there is a lot of features that are missing that would make the theme really powerful.

Most of the things that we didn’t like about this theme are things that would have been “nice-to-have” and didn’t make the them hard to work with for the most part.

What we liked:

The theme lets you choose from two powerful media sliders for your front page. Both of the media sliders are really straightforward to setup (they each have an area where you manage your slides) and are fully responsive and look pretty cool.
You can upload your own background designs for each page on the site, allowing you to easily set a style for various sections of the site.
The theme comes with three different layouts (dark, facebook, and light) that gives you a pretty broad spectrum to work with when you customize it for your website. We used the dark theme since it was what our customer liked most.
There is a good amount of documentation that comes with the theme when you get it from Themeforest. The documentation helped us with a few questions that we had around how the backgrounds worked.
The theme came with a packaged demo import that you could use to import the demo into your wordpress instance so you could see how the demo was structured. This was handy when trying to figure out how to mimic some of the pages on their demo.

What we didn’t like:

The portfolio uses the very slick Isotope jQuery plugin and allows you to specify various sizes for your portfolio images to come up with a compelling layout. However, the developers of Mediastar didn’t use the Hash History feature of Isotope which allows you to store history in your browser’s hash as well as link directly to specific categories of the portfolio. This was something that the customer really wanted to do. For example, they wanted to link to just the Bedroom pics, but we had to customize the isotope setup code in order to do this.
One of the sliders mentioned previously is built on the Sequence library and comes with the Apple Style Theme. This is a cool theme, but it would have been nice to have included the other themes and let the user choose which of them to use for the sequence slider. In the end, the customer didn’t like the effects of the apple style theme, so we didn’t end up using this slider anywhere on the site.

White Label Development

Halfslide Design offers white label software development services to many creative and digital media agencies. We provide our clients with the expertise and bandwidth needed to help them win and retain profitable clients under their brand.

How does a White Label Relationship Work?

A white label relationship means that we perform work on a contract basis under your brand. The work belongs to you, the client, and never becomes part of our portfolio or work history. As far as your customers are concerned, your company did the work.

Halfslide Design can offer you the ability to outsource your development projects to a trust-worthy and capable team that can get your projects done by your expected deadline. Whether the project entails building an entire project from scratch, or simply taking some Photoshop files, cutting them up, and building a css/xhtml/javascript template for your team to take on, we can handle it.

Get in touch with us and find out what we can do to help you manage your development tasks.

Web Applications

Need more than just a simple online presence? Halfslide Design can build you a customized, powerful and secure application to fit your needs no matter what those needs include. Here is a sample of the types of applications we’ve built in the past.

Online volunteer management system for a medium-sized non-profit. The application interfaces with Salesforce for donor management and allows employees of the non-profit to communicate with volunteers and donors. In addition, volunteers can self-manage their information with the non-profit and collaborate with other volunteers.
An online event management application that allows individuals to see and sign-up for volunteer spots.
An analytics platform with charts/graphs for visualizing large datasets.
A mapping platform for Google Maps that allows users to build and customize their own maps for use with clients of their own when showing and browsing real estate deals.
A full-featured project-management system that allows users to collaborate over the web, their smart phones, and via email.

Have an application you need built? Contact us and we’ll get you a quote!

Mobile Sites and Applications

Mobile phones are quickly becoming a bigger and bigger part of people’s lives on the web. Is your site ready for mobile phone traffic? Halfslide Design can work with you to create a version of your site that is mobile-phone ready and supported by all of the major phone manufacturers. We can help you take advantage of the latest in phone-safe design techniques that will ensure that your users get the best possible experience when visiting your site on their mobile device.

E-Commerce Solutions

If you are selling a product or service, having an online presence with purchase facilities is absolutely crucial. Many Halfslide clients are surprised to find out just how simple and inexpensive creating an online store for their products can be. Let Halfslide Design work with you to provide your inventory to customers all over the country. We can work with you to provide the following essential e-commerce solutions.

Secure Payment Processing through the most-trusted providers. Halfslide Design has integrated clients e-commerce websites with a wide array of payment processing gateways such as Paypal, Google Checkout, and Authorize.net. Our e-commerce sites are built in a way that it allows the customer to choose the payment method that is most comfortable for them.

Shipping Integration Once you’ve sold your product online, it’s now important to ship it out to your customer. Halfslide Design can provide integrations for printing labels through the US Postal Service and through 3rd Party label printing services like Endicia. We can also integrate your site with shipping services like USPS, UPS, and FedEx to provide shipping calculators and delivery tracking.

Currency Conversion and Internationalization Want to provide your services or products internationally? No problem! Halfslide Design will get your site ready for the world market by providing real-time currency conversion to your customers and provide you with a site that is easily translated into various languages.

Off-The-Shelf Cart Customization Have an online presence running on one of the many open-source e-commerce solutions that you need customized? Halfslide Design has worked with customers in the past to customize e-commerce pacakges such as osCommerce, ZenCart, Substruct and Magneto.

Website Hosting

Already have a website that you need to have maintained or hosted? Halfslide Design can work with you to design an inexpensive maintenance or hosting plan that meets your needs. You can rely on Halfslide’s proven reliability to ensure that your application or website is performing at its best and is available and ready whenever your users need it.

Host Your Application in the Cloud

Want the reliability and scalability of the cloud? We can setup and manage your server in Rackspace’s Cloud or on Amazon’s Web Services platform. Hosting your application in the cloud lets you take advantage of the latest server hardware. It also allows you to tailor your bandwidth, memory, and storage resources exactly to your needs while giving you the ability to scale up as your needs grow. Halfslide Design has worked with our website hosting customers to design cloud platforms that offer server backups, file storage, database access, and mail processing.

Host Your Website on our Dedicated Servers

Don’t want to deal with setting up your own hosting account and managing your account? Let us host your application directly on one of our dedicated servers and call us if you ever need help or have problems. Many Halfslide Design clients appreciate the fact that they can always call/email us directly when their site is having an issue and get a prompt response. So talk to us about what plans we offer and how we can help you get the best dedicated server hosting package available.

Frugal Grape

Frugal Grape is a daily deal site focusing on selling bundles of wine for steep discounts. The site is built using the codeigniter framework and is currently finishing up development while the client acquires their liquor license. The client at Frugal Grape approached Halfslide Design due to our established history of successful deal-of-the-day sites and we were happy to be a part of the project. Due to the fact that the site is selling wine, there are a few interesting features that were required:

Legally, wine can only be shipped to certain states within the United States. Due to this, we had to design the registration and purchase process to prevent customers from entering a shipping address that is inside of a state that doesn’t allow wine shipments.
It is prohibited to advertise alcohol to minors, so Frugal Grape is built with a prompt asking for the visitors age before they are allowed into the site. If a visitor is under 21, they are blocked from the site.

Frugal Grape was also designed to allow customers to sign up for a customized daily e-mail notification when new wine deals are available. This is accomplished by allowing the customer to fill out a short questionnaire when they create their account that lets them select the wines, grapes, countries, or wine producers that they like and want to be notified of. The site then collects this information and will only send the customer a notification when a daily deal is released that matches their criteria. This allows the customer to only receive email notifications for wines that they are truly interested in.

Frugal Grape is now another successful example of Halfslide Design’s e-commerce website design capabilities. Visit the site yourself and let us know what you think of it.

Bizzio is now on Google Play

We recently completed the mobile application for Bizzio and pushed it out to Google Play. The application allows mobile users to see their projects, download files, update their account, create and update tasks, and add/review comments. Future features planned currently are the ability to take pictures and upload files to your projects/deals.

The application was written using the Sencha Touch 2 library and was cross-compiled with Phonegap. The application has been submitted to Apple and is currently pending review before they allow it to be distributed through the iTunes App Store.

You can snag the application for free from the following link: Bizzio Mobile on Google Play

Bizzio

Halfslide Design recently completed a project for Bizzio, Inc. Bizzio is a project management Saas (Software as a Service) application that specifically targets individuals in the commercial real estate sector. We built an online application at http://www.bizzio.com, a mobile website at http://m.bizzio.com, as well as an iPhone IOS application and Android application.

The purpose of Bizzio is to manage projects. It’s full configurable to manage any kind of project. In fact, we use Bizzio with the client to manage enhancements and bugs for the site itself. The site has a few of the following features that we think provide a lot of use to Bizzio users:

Automatic Monthly billing through Stripe that provides a 45-day free trial and then bills the customer monthly depending on what pricing plan they’ve chosen.
The ability to drag and drop files onto their projects in order to upload them and share them with individuals linked to their project.
The ability to invite others to participate on a project and share files, assign tasks, and make comments on each project.
Users can fully customize the fields or properties for each project. For example, a user can setup a date field for a property like “Due Date”, a currency field for a property such as “Price”, or a Yes/No field for a property like “Contacted the prospective owner?”.
Users can email files/comments attached to a project to anyone whether they are a member of the project or not.
Users can add comments to the project by replying to emails sent from other project users and those comments will automatically be attached to the project and emailed out to other users.

Bizzio Mobile Website

Bizzio has a mobile version of their site that is built on Sencha Touch 2.2. The mobile site is a scaled-down version of the desktop site that provides most of the features in a light-weight format that fits on the smaller screen of a mobile browser. The mobile site is fully compatible with most popular mobile phones such as Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, and Apple iPhone.

Mobile Applications

The mobile version of the website has been converted into a mobile application for both Android and iPhone apps. While the iPhone application is not yet available in the Apple App Store, the Android version is available on Google Play here

Simple PHP Function for Iterating over Microsoft Excel Column Names

I recently had a need to create a function that iterates over a list of strings and writes them out to a column in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that I was creating for a client. In Excel, the columns are labeled A-Z, AA-AZ, BA-BZ, etc… and it continues on. I couldn’t find any existing functions in PHP that did this, so I wrote my own below:

function column_name($index) {
if($index<27) {
$letter = “A”;
for($i=1; $i<$index; $i++) {
$letter++;
}
} else {
$div = intval($index / 27);
$mod = $index % 27;
$letter = column_name($div);
$letter.= column_name($mod);
}
return $letter;
}