designs of the times
Wonder what our work looks like?
Here is some information about the sites that we have designed and deployed for our clients.If you would like to visit any of the sites listed simply click on the thumbnail image of the site and it will open in a new browser window.
Enjoy...
Community Theatre
Community Theatre of Emporia
Community Theatre of Emporia's pages at CTEKS.COM is primarily a "brag site" set up to showcase some of the work done by this fine local group of amateur thespians.
The site serves multiple purposes for the group. It acts as a showcase first and foremost but it also provides a very affordable platform for them to communicate with and promote to the live theatre community at large. They can, and do, use it to advertise upcoming events and distribute information to interested parties.
site features
This site, because it deals with entertainment, was built to be entertaining in and of itself. The primary page on the site features a flash animation in the header and throughout the site the links are formatted with secondary mouse-over images. If you are not sure what a mouse-over is, open the site and hold your cursor over any of the links on the left.
The Gallery section is where they exhibit images from past seasons. We used pop-up windows to run short (10 images) slide shows showing scenes from their productions. The Gallery also features the programs from the shows in an Adobe Acrobat Reader format that can be viewed or printed from a Web browser.
Lyon County Museum
Lyon County Museum
This site, lyoncountymuseum.org, is primarily an informational site. Intended as a historical resource on the Internet it gives a broad overview of Lyon County's wealth of historical materials and its place in the history of the nation. It also provides a platform for solicitation of new or ongoing membership in the Historical Society.
The site is also used to promote current and future exhibits at the museum and events both for the museum and the community at large. This provides an affordable promotional platform for the organization as well as an easy to use tool for community outreach and involvement.
site features
The depth and variety of information that this site can contain dictates a 'partitioned' site structure. This means that the primary domain, lyoncountymuseum.org, has several sub-domains. These sub-domains mirror the organization itself with archives, exhibits, education, etc. housed in their own discrete areas.
Lyoncountymuseum.org makes strategic use of on demand pop-up slide shows. This is used to provide "virtual tours" of exhibits and automated display of featured content from the site. These pop-up windows are only exhibited if called upon via clearly labeled links on the site.
This site also makes use of a community calendar that is configured to open in its own pop-up window when a link to it is clicked. This calendar can be managed by any number of designated calendar administrators who can schedule events using a Web browser from any Internet connected computer.
Any event placed on the calendar can be scheduled to appear, or disappear, at a set date and time. This allows for the scheduling of events well in advance of their occurrence with minimal ongoing maintenance to the calendar.
S.C. Dixon Portrait Art
S.C.Dixon Portrait Art
Scdixon.com is intent on promoting a product. Quality, artistic technique, and fastidious attention to detail are this photographer's stock in trade. The site was built with this in mind.
No bells, no whistles, just clean lines and muted backgrounds to keep the focus on the product.
site features
Mr. Dixon has amassed a vast body of work over his time as a professional photographer, because of this the site necessarily divides his work into categories. Once we had determined through our conversations with the artist what he wished to showcase on his site, we agreed on three basic groups to place his work in. These groups were set up as galleries on his site, each with carefully selected representations of his work.
The gallery links generate pop-up windows with slide shows of these selected images automatically changed at eight second intervals.
The images on the site have been sized down to promote faster loading and discourage the unauthorized use of the copyrighted property. The idea is to display the work, not give it away to anyone who right clicks on it.
Mr. Dixon has even been told by people that view his site, "We wish you had made the images larger so I could use one as the wallpaper on my desktop." While this is a flattering sentiment it does not make great business sense to give your product away.
We have suggested that Mr. Dixon may, in the future, offer "packages" of four or five images suitably sized for use as wallpaper. For a fee.
This site, while based in HTML (HyperText Markup Language), makes considerable use of a scripting language called PHP that builds the pages dynamically. This means that making global changes to all of the pages on the site usually involves editing just one or two files. This is a tremendous time, and cost saver, when maintenance or updating of the site is required.