Web Development
If you are reading this then you have obviously visited my website, and most likely Katie's website as well. So it should come as no surprise to you that in addition to all the other things I do, I also dabble in web development. In fact, all three iterations of the Ferguson Family (that would be me and Katie, as opposed to my parents) were developed by myself. I did the implementation and coding while Katie handled the task of deciding what looked good. Of the two, Katie definetly had the easier job. I cannot begin to convey how much I had to contort html and css to get it to look the way we wanted it to.
Obviously my website and Katie's are examples of my web development skills and I recommend you check them out if you have not already done so. I'm particularly proud of getting the rounded corners and the drops shadows to work together as well as of the archive page that I made for Katie's site and then procured for my own. Also, the flash animation on the opening page of Rainy Day Communications was all my own doing. Anyway, here are some other websites that I've worked on over the years. Anything I did before these isn't worth posting. The first version of Got Marriage? kind of embarrasses me though. At least those days are past.
MQP Website
04.30.2005
One of the requirements of my MQP was that we had to create a website to communicate what we had learned in the process of developing a digital acoustic communication system. As I was the only person on the team that had any experience with web page design, that task fell to me. At the time, the spinlab webpage was done using tables, which I didn't like, so for the MQP site I copied the style using css and divs. Also, our professor loves all things open source, so it had to be cross browser compatible. That's what has given me the most experience working around browser incompatibilities with css.
In the time since the project finished, our professor redid the spinlab page with a completely new style, so he took down the MQP page. At some point I'll probably rework it to match the new design.
If you check out the page, there's a secret if you click on the question mark in "Who Was Involved?"
IQP Website
03.01.2004
This is the website that my IQP team produced for Merton, a Borough of London. It's only available on their intranet, although I have heard rumors that parts of it are being reused on their public website as well. This is the culmination of fourteen weeks of fairly intensive work. Not the website itself, but the content of the website.
I was not the primary web designer on this project. Russell Souza did all of the actual coding and most of the layout. I however, produced all of the GIS maps. All of them. All of the maps and all of the images of those maps. It was the most repetitive job I've ever done. But everyone was really impressed with the work. Sadly, Merton hosted their intranet on a Microsoft Server so several of the cool features we added were done in ASP, which is not supported on Rainydaycommunications.net. Perhaps someday I'll convert it to php or perl, but for now you can only look at it, you can't generate dynamic charts of the data.
Got Marriage? Version 2.0
01.23.2005 - 03.15.2006
Unfortunately it soon became obvious that I wasn't as dedicated to my blog as Katie was, so we decided to separate the blogs so that it didn't look weird that my side never updated. At the same time, Katie decided she wanted to go with a different design. We left the opening page and my blog the same as before, but as you can see from the picture we totally changed Katie's blog. Very slowly our web presence transformed with from a somewhat amateurish look to the more polished, professional look it has today. Some of that is due to my increased web development abilities, but a large part comes from Katie's evolving design sense.
This time around I made sure that the site was compatible with all browsers, not just IE. Of course, that turned out to be really really hard, but ultimately I got it to work. It was at this point that I added a nifty archives page and a search feature, based on some php work I had done for the MQP website.
Got Marriage? Version 1.0
09.19.2003 - 01.23.2005
Just a month after Katie and I got married, our good friend Ben Morrell offered us free hosting at his domain, AnalogCafe.net. So it was then that we delved into the emerging world of blogging. Katie and I decided to use our newly married status as the theme for the site, so we chose the rather clever (in my opinion) title of "Got Marriage?" Even better, we decided to present both blogs on the same webpage. At the time I used frames to accomplish that, but I have since seen the error of my ways.
If you visit the site, it will look pretty cool in internet explorer, but it won't look so good in other browsers.
Extra
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For extra cool things to be put here
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