Site launch: CordobaSzekely.com

This morning we launched a refreshed site and an all-new online store for one of my clients, CordobaSzekely Productions.

Robert Cordoba and Deborah Székely are dance instructions and multiple-time national champions at the U.S. Open West Coast Swing Championships. They teach West Coast Swing and other dances all around the US and the world, and market a line of dance instructional DVDs.

Their former site had gotten a bit long in the tooth, so this was a just a quick refresher, keeping the former graphics design but bringing the HTML and CSS up to contemporary standards. Their online store was completely reimplemented using the open-source Zen Cart, where formerly they’d used the proprietary (and often difficult to use) Miva Merchant.

Another new design for LRDesign.com

Apparently I can’t stop playing, because today I built and uploaded a third design for the LRDesign main site: “Blue Art”. This one required the IE PNG fix from Twin Helix for IE 6.0 compatibility.

I think there are still a few annoying bugs in the stylesheet switcher on IE; once I clean those up I plan to write a post explaining how to easily set up this kind of stylesheet switcher in a Rails project.

New theme added to LRDesign.com

For quite a while I’ve wanted to decorate the main Logical Reality site with multiple, switchable themes, implementing each with pure CSS on top of semantic HTML markup, a la the CSS Zen Garden. Last night I finally got a start on that, implementing a simple stylesheet switcher and a grunge theme with textures from Urban Dirty.

To check it out, load the main site and click the “Change Skin” link in the upper left.

New LRDesign Site Launched

The Logical Reality main site has been badly neglected for far too long: for several months it’s just been a plain-text site with no theme, listing a bare portfolio. It’s so hard to prioritize working on my own site when there is plenty of work to do for my clients!

A custom Ruby on Rails portfolio display engine is in the works (patterned after the one I did for La Cañada Design Group). My goal is to make it skinnable with switchable themes, implemented entirely in CSS on semantic markup, a la the CSS Zen Garden. In the meantime, though, I’ve uploaded a basic site (written in RoR, but with only static pages for the moment) with a new minimalist theme.

Website Launch: Insoshi Social Networking Platform

The Insoshi Open-Source Social Networking Platform project was just launched yesterday! Logical Reality designed both the Insoshi logo, and landing/informational site that leads new users to the project itself.

Insoshi is built with Ruby on Rails, and is the first major social networking tool to be released completely open-source. Here’s an article on Insoshi and the launch at TechCrunch.

The site was a rapid-development Web-2.0 style project, developed using the blueprint CSS framework and other standards-compliant techniques. The logo was chosen to represent Insoshi’s core functionality in social networking: communication between people. The lowercase i’s on the ends invoke iconified people, with the “broadcast” arcs indicating communication from one to the other.