NY Times Article about East Liberty, Where we are Located

March 13th, 2010

East Liberty, the Pittsburgh neighborhood where our office is, has been featured recently in the New York Times. In fact, the first picture (of the folks standing in an all-glass room) shows our office in the background. Among the more interesting tidbits in the article is that our city currently has the healthiest commercial real estate market in the country, according to Moody’s.

Read the whole article here.

Some Slick Site Design to Share…

February 28th, 2010

Some nicely-done sites I’ve found recently:

That’s it! Enjoy!

Case Study: Social Networking on Peaceburgh

January 31st, 2010

Web 2.0 is a buzz-word, right? Which means everyone uses it and no one knows what it means.

Seriously, though, the term is often misused as a design style (”This website looks so Web 2.0!”) as opposed to what it truly is– “Web 2.0″ … is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs…” (source: trusty Wikipedia) Go right on reading »

Case Study: Drupal as an Educational Platform

November 15th, 2009

Drupal, the ever-growing website management framework, has long been known in the web development industry as a content management system that allows website administrators to log into their site via a web browser– without special software, just as one would do with, say, a Gmail account– and keep their site up-to-date without knowing HTML or other technology.

When you dig deeper, though, it is much more, as we demonstrated with our redesign/redevelopment of Pittsburgh Prep– which included a move to the Drupal platform. Pittsburgh Prep is an educational company focusing on standardized test prep classes and private tutoring, and in early 2009 they made the decision to move towards a web-based solution for the selling and management of classes. In 2010, they plan to add online courses and Blackboard-like functionality that will include forums and quiz-taking. Go right on reading »

ClockingIT for Project Management

October 26th, 2009

Ever have a rough time managing multiple web design projects and multiple workers per job? How about logging hours during, say, a day when you work on 10 projects?

As a project manager, I find it harder than ever to keep track of everything and everyone, and of course email and text documents just don’t to projects justice. Enter ClockingIT, a BaseCamp-like solution for logging hours, projects, and individual tasks. Go right on reading »

Whole Advice goes live

June 15th, 2009

One of my recent projects, Whole Advice, has just recently gone live.

Whole Advice is the brainchild of Tom Dickson, an experienced financial advisor and marketing expert. This business, though, is unique: it’s not a financial advisor, but rather a “second opinion” on investment and advice. Clients approach Whole Advice to find financial advisors and get an “inside scoop” on the business– so as to be all the wiser, especially in the wake of Bernie Madoff and other less-than-reputable investment “gurus”.

For this website, we decided to stick to a simple design and palette, giving a professional yet “earthy” and “natural” look– consistent with this business’s values. We also developed a custom logo to span the gap between contemporary and timeless. Technically, this site is managed via WordPress, the open source PHP/MySQL content management/blogging platform the visuaLATTE blog uses. We also make use of jQuery, as with most of our recent projects.

If you’re a web designer, and this sounds familiar…

June 9th, 2009

I came  across a great piece at A List Apart (in my view, a premier online magazine of the web profession) about self-employment and burnout.

The G-20 Summit

June 5th, 2009

Our city is hosting the next G20 Summit — pretty neat-o. Seems maybe we’ll be a symbol of recovery? And it’ll give Pittsburgh a chance to showcase the David Lawrence Convention Center, the biggest and first LEED Gold certified convention center.