David Kaloyanides, certified specialist in criminal law and defender of alleged federal criminals, is one of the most badass people I’ve ever met. When I did meet him, however, his website just didn’t do him justice. We fixed that.

I worked with him to design and build a site that would effectively display his record, his approach, and perhaps most importantly, his commanding personality.

Check out the live site at federalcrimesdefender.com.

I am so proud of this project. When the video production company Enjoy Human decided they wanted to radically revamp their site for 2010, we sat down together and planned everything out thoroughly. They knew they wanted something sleek, clean, and designed for widescreen monitors. But beyond that, they didn’t get too hung up on the trivial aesthetics like a lot of clients do (“Can we get the icons in cornflower blue?”), and instead focused on how to effectively present their impressive body of work. There were no last minute direction changes, no jumping from a horse to an elephant in mid-stride so to speak. The clear focus of all parties resulted in a clean, intuitively usable design, and some of the most beautifully efficient code I’ve ever produced.

In addition to designing and coding the site templates, I set up a high definition Flash video player that would handle varying aspect ratios. This player is integrated into the surrounding page in such a way that the page will adapt to the dynamic size and shape of the player. The video library is powered by wordTube, a Wordpress plugin I co-developed.

I created a custom Wordpress plugin to power the homepage featured content slideshow, which is a Flash AS3 application I built from scratch. Enjoy Human 2010 also uses a thumbnail generation plugin I built, originally for Antiquiet.

Check out the live site at enjoyhuman.com.

So it’s not the prettiest site to look at, but it’s got some of my best code under the hood.

Butler Sourcing, a manufacturer in China, approached me through recommendation in December of 2009. They had a very complex vision that they were having trouble realizing with their outsource teams. They wanted to create a template for a series of websites for specific products. The template would need to be tweaked visually for each site of course, but it also needed to feature an interactive quote wizard that a user could use to “build” a customized product.

I developed a custom Wordpress plugin and a Wordpress theme to achieve this. The plugin allows Butler to set up an arbitrary number of “steps” for each site, and then an arbitrary number of options for each step, each with an image. The design will automatically flex for any combination, and accommodate option images of wildly varying shapes and sizes. Butler has the ability to let a step accept only one selected option, or multiple options.

I also developed a custom Wordpress plugin to display a dynamic jQuery slideshow of examples for each site.

I delivered all of this to Butler in less than one month.

Try my wizard out on a live site here.

Justin Dettle reviews extreme heavy metal music for Antiquiet. He’s got so much to say, we decided to give him his own blog dedicated to metal. I threw this together one weekend, after commissioning a badass logo from the very talented Wes DeSoto. Designing this site was so fun. The stone texture is a photograph I took in my backyard.

Visit Heavy Dettle

It’s about time I add this one. I created Antiquiet in 2007 with Johnny Firecloud. I designed it (we’re on our fourth version), I built it, I write for it, I shoot video for it, I edit video for it, I record and edit live sound for it, I throw events, design flyers, design ads, sell ads, traffic ads, I manage our SEO- which is great- I do business development, I administer the server, the works. I don’t know why this wasn’t the first thing into my portfolio, but when I say I can do it all, Antiquiet backs it up.

View Antiquiet Live

I was a bit of a swiss army knife on this project. I built the initial HTML/CSS shell (please view my work here; the live version has been hacked apart a bit since, but I’m proud of the code I delivered). I also did some extensive AJAX work on the Drink Recipes page, and I built the hybrid HTML/video jQuery feature panel, which was a strangely complex custom order; The client wanted it to open with a Flash video, play through that video only once, and then seamlessly begin sliding through a series of panels assembled dynamically from the contents of flagged WordPress posts.

I maintain several sites on the WordPress platform that require a robust delivery system for streaming audio and Flash video, hosted locally for full monetization. Rather than lock myself in a proverbial basement and build it from the ground up (as I might have done a few years ago), I found the best open-source product and joined the development team as a volunteer contributor.

My contributions to the WordTube project include working with LongTail Video as a beta tester to refine their advertising solutions for JW Flash Players deployed on WordPress, as well as adding features to WordTube itself. I enabled playlist-driven media players to continuously play through a series of items (with a CMS toggle to allow the end-user to control this behavior). I also enabled the WordTube system to display the media player in WordPress excerpts; they would only display when viewing single posts prior.

View source code for some of my changes and more at the Google Code Repository for WordTube. View single-item players delivered by WordTube here, or XML playlist-driven players delivered by WordTube here.