St. Germain is a medium sized investment firm with offices in Springfield, MA and Hartford, CT. Their internal marketing team realized that their existing site wasn’t portraying the right image. The existing site was not only old, but needed to be updated to make sure the company was adhering to all the required requirements.

The new web site is what you might consider a “standard” web site for 2007. A few dynamic elements (like news and file management for the client), and a solid standards-based web design. Our goal was to create a site that looked clean and professional and pulled elements from their marketing materials.

Responsibilities

From the project kick-off I handled all of the responsibilities of this project including project management, graphic design, database design, and PHP programming.

Visit the St. Germain web site

ForeSite has partnered with the Hartford Business Journal on a variety of projects over the last few years, so when the HBJ decided to build a new web site from the ground up, ForeSite was there to lay the groundwork.

The original HBJ web site was a simple affair. The design stood, unchanged, for more then five years. Every page was still manually edited, and the content was very limited. Working with ForeSite, a specification was built to create something special that was more befitting the newspaper. The new site was built to be managed dynamically so that the HBJ staff doesn’t need to write a single line of HTML to keep it updated. In addition, it was the goal of the HBJ to move from weekly information (where they’d update two articles each week), to daily and even hourly information.

Features

The HBJ site was an ambitious piece of programming. Although we could have found an off-the-shelf CMS system that could have done some of the things we wanted it to, we decided to write everything from scratch. In the end, this was the right decision. The system isn’t overloaded with features the client doesn’t use, and the interface is straight forward and written specifically with the HBJ in mind.

News articles can be automatically important from the source Quark documents. This means that the HBJ staff doesn’t have to spend time copying and pasting text. The system manages a lot of the grunt work for them (although human oversight is needed for verification).

Responsibilities

ForeSite built everything end-to-end, including a user-friendly CMS back end to allow modification of the site. I was responsible for the front-end look-and-feel including: site design, XHTML & CSS coding, and the majority of the JavaScript work. I was also worked with the primary developer on some of the back-end PHP coding.

When the Hartford Stage needed someone to redesign their aged web site, ForeSite answered the call. I designed a new look for their site, before ForeSite had even presented a bid for work. In the end, ForeSite lost the bid for the design work, but were kept onboard for the heavy lifting.

We teamed with the highly creative Adams & Knight to develop the new site. Adams & Knight were responsible for the design of the web site and the team at ForeSite did everything else. We built a variety of systems that allowed the staff at The Hartford Stage to easily modify content (the content of the entire site can be changed easily, most of it from the web-based tool that we built).

My primary responsibility was to act as the bridge between Adams & Knight’s design and ForeSite’s development. Most of this work was turning a design (built in Quark) into a proper web based template that matched the vision of the designer at Adams & Knight but didn’t resort to hacking and tables to make it work.

Responsibilities

ForeSite’s main responsibility was the “heavy lifting”, we had no control over graphic design and very little latitude for “coloring outside of the lines”. We just had to “make it work”.

I was responsible for the layout of the site and a significant amount of the PHP/mySQL work.

Visit the Hartford Stage Company web site

The Tennant Capital Partners site was a joy to work on. The client knew exactly what they wanted, and was able to communicate this to the team at ForeSite. Without hesitation I was able to craft a design that fit the client’s vision. From design to template to final web site happened in less than two weeks. Although the design is unadorned, it perfectly matches the company image of no-nonsense and getting straight to the point.

Responsibilities

Because the vision from the client was so clear, the mockup of the Tennant Capital site came together fairly easily. Since the site was static (I only used PHP as a template engine), it also came together without significant difficulty. This may have been one of the easiest projects I’ve ever worked on.

Visit Tennant Capital Partners web site

One of the challenges for Marathon is that the corporation is still very young (and yet very large). The company has been wildly successful, and concentrating on the business has been the overriding priority. As a freshman company, Marathon’s image was undefined and finding it has proved to be a difficult process.

Marathon hired a 3rd party design firm to build marketing materials, but asked ForeSite to design the web site (but requested that the site be based on the look of the marketing materials). I suggested that we start simple and proactively build (or rebuild) the site as the requirements arose.

The Intranet

Possibly more important than an external marketing web site, was the need for a company intranet to share information across eight locations and hundreds of employees. Although we could have picked an off-the-shelf solution, it seemed as though none fit the requirements, particularly the idea of simplicity.

Expanding on original ideas I had built for Skinovative, the team at ForeSite built a custom intranet solution.

Responsibilities

I was responsible for all the front-end graphic design, XHTML construction, Flash development, and JavaScript programming. Additionally I wrote a significant amount of the PHP code.

Visit the Marathon Healthcare web site

In 2006, Skinovative decided to spin-off its internal training classes into a secondary business. The curriculum was mostly written over the years training Skinovative employees, but now a marketing site needed to be created. Of course, the site also needed to allow students to register and pay for classes online.

Building the classroom

As a second part of the process, I needed to take the existing training system that I built for Skinovative, add a number of features and re-brand it.

Responsibilities

I was responsible for all the front-end graphic design, XHTML construction, and JavaScript programming. Additionally I designed the database (mySQL) structure and wrote a significant amount of the PHP code. This was one of many sites that I was also acted as the project manager.

Before they were even called “Skinovative”, I’ve been working with this mall-based laser skin chain based in Arizona. I have completed hundreds of designs for brochures, postcards, greeting cards, advertising, posters and even store signage. I’ve spent hundreds of hours writing custom code for internal training, financial reporting and digital form processing.

The Web Site

The Skinovative web site has been experiencing a slow evolution since I originally built their first site in 2002. In 2005, using many of the same graphic elements I rebuilt the site from the ground up adding new features and simplifying the expanding service listings.

The Intranet

Although the Skinovative intranet began as a training site (which spun off in 2006 as the Academy of Aesthetic Medicine), it has also evolved into something more in the years since its inception.

The intranet has become a repository for documents as well as an online reporting tool for each of the individual storefronts to share their financials with the corporate office.

Print work

Although my original contract with Skinovative was for web design, that job also evolved into something more. In 2004 I began to work on print projects for Skinovative, and by the end of 2005 most of my projects for Skinovative were non-internet related.

In 2006, the Connecticut Healthcare Workers’ Compensation Trust celebrated their 25th anniversary. They chose this anniversary as the time to re-invent themselves. The company simplified their name and decided that it was time to update their web site.

Their existing site was a mess with no clear structure, dead end links, and of course an outdated design. My first step was to design a clear structure where I classified each important page and created a place for everything.

Once I had established a structure, I created a design with the express purpose of providing clarity of this structure and reducing confusion. Although this design migrated from it’s original purpose after client interaction, I believe the final product still stands much taller than the previous design.

Responsibilities

I was responsible for all the front-end graphic design, XHTML construction, PHP coding and database design.

Visit the Trust’s web site

In the fall of 2004, ForeSite decided to sponsor Hartford’s minor league hockey team the Wolfpack. Part of this sponsorship included running a 30 second spot before the best save by the Wolfpack goalie during the game.

The Commercial

Although we could have simply shown the ForeSite logo and allowed the announcer to read some text, we wanted something that showed that we were not the average technology company. Using the tools at hand* I crafted a 30 second commercial that fit our style.

The Web Site

In our second year of sponsorship we took our Hartford Wolfpack sponsorship to the next level, and began putting each game’s Save on the Game online for fans to rate. We wanted to bring some of the excitement of the Wolfpack games to the web.

Visit the Wolfpack Save of the Game web site

15 Second Video Spot

For the 2006 season we were asked to create a new (shorter) clip for the games. We decided to reduce the marketing spin on the clip and instead try to drive more traffic to the save of the game web site.

Responsibilities

I have been the project manager for all aspects of the save of the game campaign. I was responsible for all the front-end graphic design, XHTML construction, Flash and JavaScript programming. Additionally I designed the database (mySQL) structure and wrote a significant amount of the PHP code. For each commercial spot I was responsible for all the 3D modeling, rendering, and video editing.

Visit the Save of the Game web site

The site runs on PHP with a mySQL database feeding any dynamic content. Flash is utilized sparingly on the front page to help provide some motion. A set of administration tools allow anyone to easily add news or job postings. This site was the first site that I built as I began to be aware of writing valid code.

Responsibility

I was responsible for all design and programming work. I worked closely with our resident copywriter to draft content for pages. The site (as with most) is built using PHP and mySQL.

Visit ForeSite’s web site