Archive for the ‘Clients’ Category

Jun

30

Client Profile – Sherry Ransom

June 30th, 2010

Visit Sherry Ransom

Halfslide Design was recently contracted to redesign the site for Austin-based author and inspirational speaker, Sherry Ransom. Sherry wanted a more modern and user-friendly design applied to her personal site. Her goal was also to make it easy for visitors to get in touch with her and hire her for speaking gigs. Finally, she expressed that she wanted to be able to manage content herself and be able to publish articles on a regular basis without getting a web designer involved.

Halfslide Design built her site on the Wordpress CMS platform.  This allows Sherry to manage the content on each page and article completely on her own.  In addition, Halfslide extended the Wordpress administration area to give her the ability to manage the events listing on her site so that she could easily alert her fans to the fact that she would be speaking in their area in the near future.

We also built the site to highlight the articles that she has written in an effort to increase her search engine optimization around her topics of expertise.  Visit the site and let us know what you think about the new design.

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Apr

15

Site Redesign – Storage Strategies Now

April 15th, 2010

Storage Strategies Now – http://www.ssg-now.com

Storage Strategies Now, an Austin, Texas based storage analyst firm, recently requested Halfslide Design perform a renovation of their website www.ssg-now.com. The stated goal behind the redesign was to both provide sample content to those who are new to their service as well as provide a protected area for content that requires a subscription to access. The client also wanted to improve their search engine optimization by providing more content targeted around their service in html format rather than in pdf or doc attachments.

Halfslide Design redesigned the site to run on a customized WordPress platform similar to what the Halfslide Design site currently runs on.  We had to make several changes based on some specific business logic.  First, we had to update the customer registration process.  On SSG-Now, users who register get access to the full site the first time they visit.  Once their visit ends, their account is disabled and can only be reactivated after working out a subscription membership with SSG-Now.  This allows users to get an in-depth look at the content published by SSG-Now before they subscribe.  Halfslide Design modified the customer registration process so that all users were set as inactive after their session ended and also built-in functionality for SSG-Now to update customer accounts once a subscription had been initiated.

In addition, Halfslide Design reorganized the site so that all content published by SSG-Now that was public would be easily indexed by search engines.  Sitemaps of the site are automatically updated daily so that search engines are always aware of new content within 24 hours of it being published.  This has resulted in a dramatic increase in visits to the SSG-Now site since launch.

Finally, one last requirement from the client was that they be able to manage and update the site themselves.  In the past, the client was providing new content to Halfslide Design that we would then post to the site.  The client is now able to manage all site content, pages, links, and pages themselves.

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Dec

5

Client Profile – Playa Luxury Villas

December 5th, 2009

Visit Playa Luxury Villas

Halfslide Design recently finished the construction of a new site for a condominium and villa management company located in Cabo, Mexico. The site’s graphics were created by Graphic Designer, Barry Link. Halfslide Design took the design and built the site on top of the Wordpress content management system.

The site utilizes lists condo and villa objects that the client can manage themselves.  In order to provide this functionality, we modeled the villas as wordpress posts and built them out with custom post fields.  This allows the client to manage all of the page content and villa objects through the single wordpress interface.

Halfslide was extremely happy to work with Playa and the client continues to be easy to work with.  If you are interested in visiting the Cabo, Mexico area some time soon, I would highly recommend checking out the site and giving the crew a call to inquire about possibly staying in one of their condos or villas.

Visit Playa Luxury Villas

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Oct

26

Shirtaday Redesigned

October 26th, 2009

For the last three weeks, I’ve been busy completing a total redesign of Shirtaday.com. The site was originally created in early 2006 and was extremely simple at the time.  During the next three years, it progressively grew new features and each of these features were bolted on without keeping a consistent object model or design.  It turned into a maintenance nightmare.  Also, the design had several cross-browser issues with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 6.  It also looked poor at smaller screen resolutions.  These are just a few of the issues…I could go on forever about things that I hated about the site.

The goal of the new design was to resolve all of those issues mentioned and to really just make the site much easier to maintain.  Previously, if I changed something, I never really knew for sure just what that’d affect on the rest of the site.

A few of the things that the redesign accomplished:

  1. Better SEO. On the old site, the links to shirts and pages in the warehouse were built using query parameters such as “shirt.php?id=1″.  Most modern search engines completely ignore the query parameters, so our 700+ shirts were being treated as essentially one page.
  2. Paged Warehouse and Shirt Listing.  At one point, the warehouse contained over 120 shirts.  All of these were loaded on the single warehouse page when the user viewed it.  That was a lot of data to load and display, and if you were on a slow connection, it was painful to wait for it all to come down to your browser.  The new design incorporates paging of each list and allows the user to search through the lists using some new search functionality that we built into the site.  For instance, if you want to buy a black, large shirt for less than $10, you can narrow your search to this so that only shirts relevant to your criteria are displayed.
  3. Better design. The original design was table-based, and some tables had tables within them that went three to four layers deep.  Ouch.  What a nightmare that was to maintain.  The new design is completely css based and is much more straightforward to maintain and enhance.  New pages and sections can be plugged in or move around extremely simply.
  4. Better navigation. The main goal at shirtaday is to sell t-shirts and i think the new design helps shirtaday reach that goal better.  I believe it’s more intuitive for a user to come to the site and get through a checkout with a shirt they like.  Purchase options are emphasized with bold print and highlighted colors.
  5. Ajax and jQuery. The new site utilizes ajax and jQuery for many things like voting for your favorite shirt or adding an item to your cart.  This, in my opinion, really enhances the user experience at the site.

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Aug

6

Client Profile – Patrick D. West Law Firm

August 6th, 2009

Patrick D. West Law Firm is a Dallas/Fort Worth metro area law firm that specializes in bankruptcy and tax litigation for small businesses and individuals. The firm recently came to us to have a complete renovation of their site as well as hosting on Halfslide’s dedicated servers.  Their previous site had a dated layout and wanted to take advantage of new design techniquest that could improve their search engine rankings.  We delivered a new layout to their site as well as optimized content completed by our project managing partner, Renee Harrington.

The new site incorporates a wordpress blog so that the firm can frequently post interesting articles and how-tos on bankruptcy related topics.  Halfslide created a custom template to incorporate the blog into the new site so that navigation between the blog and the rest of the site would be seamless.  See for yourself the new look of Patrick D. West Law Firm here.

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Dec

21

Client Profile – Storage Strategies Now

December 21st, 2007

I recently finished a site for Storage Strategies Now, an industry analyst firm that provides reports and commentary on the technology market.  Storage Strategies Now is located here in Austin, Texas and was founded in 2007 by a well-known storage observer, Deni Connor.

There’s not much to the site itself other than the fact that it was created using php and it uses Adobe’s Contribute technology to allow the client to make updates to the site themselves. I basically put together the layout and used php includes to include small pages of content that the client can update.  This gives the added benefit of allowing the client to update the content on the site without having to worry about disturbing the general layout.  Very cool technology.

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Sep

5

Hataday – New Hat Every Day

September 5th, 2007

I recently finished work on hataday.com for a client at JustSports.net. The site functions similarly to Shirtaday in that a new item is put up for sale every single day and only a limited number are available. It’s all based on the woot.com business model. The only difference with this site is that there is no price decline with each item that is purchased. This makes sense as the hats are all pre-ordered so there is no cost decline as with t-shirts.

The site was my first interaction with authorize.net. Overall, I would say that they have a strong product offering. Their developer integration documentation is very rich and their example code covers just about everything you will need to do a full integration. I wasn’t pleased with all the hoops you have to jump through to get started with them though. For example, in order to get a developer account, you have to basically send them an email and they will get back to you in a day or two. With paypal and google, all you do is create an account through their websites and you are off and running. Much simpler and allows you to do everything you need to do without getting help from their support teams.

There weren’t too many suprises with this site and it looks to be a really good front-end for justsports.net. Let’s hope they can get some traffic flowing to the site through all of the deal of the day sites so that they can be successful.

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