David Emery Online

I don't really do web design so much any more - I firmly have a marketing hat on these days (and it's a pretty snazzy hat, let me tell you...).

Below is an archive of previous sites I've worked on.

I’m really happy with the way it’s turned out; we went for a rather unconventional horizontal layout, which I have to say turned into a massive headache but we managed to get there in the end with some creative CSS-ing. It’s augmented by a rather nifty javascript based dragging system – you can drag the pages around left and right like a Google Map!

The main content – news, tour dates, videos etc – is all powered by Textpattern, which is still very much our lightweight CMS of choice. On top of that we’ve layered two separate things; firstly, we bring in – via their superb API – photos from Flickr, which I think is by far the best way of getting photos on a website.

Secondly, we’ve got something we call “the Grid”. The Grid is, in its simplest form, a social network for To My Boy fans. You can sign yourself up, get your self a page on the site (and a place on the home page) and start talking to other fans. It’s something we’ve developed from scratch in-house – we couldn’t find anything off the shelf that would do quite what we wanted – and we very much want to add more features to it as time goes on, including things like RSS (which we only have on news at the moment), microformats maybe even Twitter integration (which is working out nicely for Jack Penate).

We also made use of sIFR (version 3 to be exact) for Flash replacement of assorted text all over the site, as To My Boy use Bauhaus all over their artwork and we wanted to keep the same feel. To round out our Flash usage, we also use a javascript audio player that uses Flash on the back-end to play the audio – exactly the kind of thing I was talking about yesterday. Audio playing in this way is probably the perfect example of PPJ as you quite often want it to integrate with a pre-existing HTML page (a track listing in this case) and you don’t get any of the UI differences or have any problem fitting perfectly in with the existing content.

Did I mention that this site only took us two weeks, start to finish?

And that’s only with 2 people working on it as well, and one of them very much only part time (that would be me, ducking in and out doing the design and general guidance).