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Whole Advice goes live

Monday, 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.

Really Cool jQuery plugins

Monday, May 25th, 2009

I’ve written before about jQuery, the open-source JavaScript library that makes it far less time-consuming to do visually stimulating website effects– which one formerly could only do with Flash– using lightweight, accessible JavaScript. The greatest thing about jQuery, though, is that it by itself is lightweight and, unlike Prototype/Scriptaculous (which are bigger, more complex libraries), relies on thousands of small, easy plugins that do much of the “fancy” work.

Here are a few that I have made use of recently, and wanted to share:

  • Lightbox (creates image overlays)
  • Shadowbox (does the same thing as Lightbox, but supports HTML entities, video, audio, you name it
  • Cycle (creates versatile slideshows)
  • Step Carousel (makes “carousel-type” slideshows which slide to the right or left when the “next” or “previous” button is clicked)
  • Validate (simply and easily validates forms)
  • Superfish (makes versatile, animated drop-down menus)

jQuery

Friday, March 27th, 2009

One web programming framework I have come to love is jQuery. This is a JavaScript (JS) library, meaning essentially it’s a bunch of pre-coded JS that makes it far easier to do complex client-side functions and animations (i.e. right on your browser). jQuery extends the “normal” functions of JS such that it makes use of CSS selectors, which makes it easy to use– and in addition, it gives you tons of out-of-the-box capabilities, such as drag-and-drop and custom Flash-like animations– on, of course, an HTML website.

Another great thing about jQuery is the plugins available. There are literally hundreds of free, open-source (just as jQuery itself is) plugins that build on jQuery’s capabilities.

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