April 22nd, 2008

Minor Tweaks

Filed under Design, Personal on April 22nd, 2008 by Chris Harrison

I made some minor changes to the site this morning. Notably, the site is no longer 640px wide. I opted to increase the overall width to 960px so that I could add a sidebar. As I develop this iteration out further, the reason I added the sidebar will be more apparent. I have done no browser testing as of yet. I would be surprised if the site wasn’t broken, but don’t fret… change is coming. I appreciate your patience.

December 10th, 2007

Sandboxing

Filed under Personal on December 10th, 2007 by Chris Harrison

I finally took the plunge and switched over to using Sandbox for Wordpress. I’m hoping to have some time over the coming weeks to apply my own design to it… for the time being, this one will work. Stay tuned.

February 26th, 2007

Far From Done

Filed under Design, Personal on February 26th, 2007 by Chris Harrison

Well, the new site design is here… sort of. I’m still working on a lot of behind the scenes stuff… but I felt like where I am with everything is much better than where I was with the previous iteration of the site. So, without further adieu, here’s Effercio - version 14 of cdharrison.com. There’s still a lot more to do at this point…

  • Integrate hAtom and hCard support.
  • Fix paging glitch when browsing categories.
  • Search and Archives need to be improved… The paging glitch is effecting these as well.
  • Fix notifications.
  • Create alternate, high contrast stylesheet.
  • Fix rendering bugs…
  • And much more…

It’s getting there though. Let me know if you encounter any problems while using the site.

March 24th, 2006

We Have Liftoff: MAU.com

Filed under Work on March 24th, 2006 by Chris Harrison

MAU Screenshot

Months of hard work have finally paid off - we launched the new MAU.com, just moments ago.

The site was an awesome undertaking. We had to convert several years worth of static content, and reorganize it in a logical way. We worked closely with MAU staff to ensure everything worked the way the organization needed for it to work. All of us at PowerServe really appreciate having the opportunity to work with MAU on this project. We hope you’ll check it out.

MAU, Inc. is one of the nation’s largest workforce solution providers. Based in Augusta with offices in Georgia, South Carolina and Illinois, MAU provides provides comprehensive and integrated workforce solutions for corporations and businesses.

PowerServe worked with MAU, Inc.’s marketing team to redesign MAU’s site to showcase what sets MAU apart from their competition. The new design is clean, simple and flexible. It was designed to compliment existing marketing materials, as well as to give MAU a more refined look on the web.

Our goals for this site were simple: make it easy to use; make it look more professional; make it more search engine friendly; make it more extensible.

To make it easier to use, we conducted a site audit of the pre-existing website, and organized content into a more logical structure. This helped us to “trim the fat” and remove a lot of older content no longer being utilized or that was no longer relevant.

To make it more professional, we developed a design that would compliment some of the print materials MAU had already been producing. We also wanted to design something that would compliment the MAU logo colors: blue and orange. We utilized SlideShowPro on a number of pages to give the site a more polished, dynamic feel.

To make the site more search-engine friendly, we recoded the entire site from scratch, utilizing web standards, and semantically sound markup. The reduction in code also helped the site to load faster. It is now more compatible with all mainstream web browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Mozilla Firefox 1.5 (Mac/PC) and Apple Safari 2.0.

To make the site more extensible, we utilized a new template structure to make it 1) easier to add new pages; 2) easier to manipulate the look and feel of all pages; and 3) easier to manage existing pages. Design changes take seconds versus the minutes and hours they once took.

This redesign project was a huge undertaking, but the final product was more than worth it.

November 29th, 2005

Changes Coming

Filed under Design on November 29th, 2005 by Chris Harrison

I thought my issues with Blogger were over. They aren’t. I’m still getting Broken Pipeline errors when I try to publish. I got no response from Blogger. I guess this is to be expected from such a big company… especially one offering free applications.

After evaluating several blog applications, I have decided to make the switch over to MovableTypeWordpress. I’ll be working on migrating my existing content over to the new blog app in the coming weeks.

Stay tuned…