Contact Chase

Project Details

  • Employer: GigaShock, LLC
  • Client: O'Leary Builders
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Website and CMS
  • Teammates: Stephen Krings

Project Tags

The following tags have been assigned:

Media Gallery

One version of the home page for the O'Leary Builders website.One version of the looking to build page for the O'Leary Builders website.A sample of the photo gallery page separating images into individual albums.A sample of a page displaying images from an individual album.
The contact form used to contact the site owners.Another version of the home page for the O'Leary Builders website.Another version of the looking to build page for the O'Leary Builders website.The homes for sale page. This page includes combination slideshow/image galleries associated with details about homes currently listed for sale by the site owners.
The referral program page, allowing users to provide the contact information for themselves and a friend to the site owners.Contact form for this version of the website.The private administrative panel for the site. The admin navigation tab is only made visible when the user has authenticated as an admin.The site owners can use the custom built CMS to manage all of the site's content. In this example the user is editing the content displayed in the left sidebar of every page on the site.
The site owners can use the custom built CMS to manage all of the site's content. In this example the user is editing the content of the looking to build page using a WYSIWYG TinyMCE editor.The user can also manage all image media on the site including the image galleries and images shown in the large slideshow incorporated into the header of each page.The administrative page allowing the user to manage the list of photo albums available on the site.Administrators can add images to the site individually using this tool.
Administrators can also add images in large bulk uploads using a Java applet which makes adding batches of images a much easier process.Administrators can use this page to manage their images, define which images are visible in the site-wide slideshow at the top of the site, and define which image is to be used on the home page of the website.

O'Leary Builders

This project was done as part of my work as owner and lead developer with GigaShock, LLC. This project consisted of creating a brand new website including all design and functionality for O'Leary Builders, home builders from Great Falls, Montana. Throughout the process we developed a number of theme options for the visual appearance of the website that the site owners could choose to user for different purposes and could be adapted to changes in the company's logo and colors. These can be seen in the media gallery on this page. The first features a simple look with fewer navigation options and a single content column. The second features extended navigation options, a large slideshow component incorporated into each page, and a sidebar alongside each page's content.

The creation of this website also heavily involved developing specialized administrative management tools which could be used by any website administrator with basic computer skills to manage the textual content of the website as well as all images, photo albums, and image slide shows featured throughout the site. This custom CMS included a number of advanced features such as the ability to group images into several photo albums which would be displayed on the gallery page. This allowed a single image to be placed within two or more albums. For example, an image of a specific house's kitchen could be placed in both the album for the specific home it was part of as well as in the album featuring pictures of kitchens from various houses. Each image also had the ability to be included in or excluded from the global slideshow present in the top of every page on one of the possible templates for the site.

The administrative management tools also allows the site administrators to designate specific albums as for sale and to associate a description with that album. On the extended template these albums will appear on the homes for sale page as small slideshow/image galleries along with the specific details of the property for sale as well as show up automatically as links from the home page of the site.

I also heavily utilized the dynamic image manipulation features available from within the Kohana PHP framework throughout the process to ensure images uploaded by administrators were properly sized and were cropped and resized properly when creating thumbnails. Automating all of these actions allows the site administrator to upload images of different size, aspect ratio, or file type without having to worry about the impact it would have on the site's visual appearance. In addition to being able to upload images individually, I also created a mass image upload tool that utilized a Java applet on the client size and performs all of the same actions on the server side using PHP in order to allow the administrators to upload large batches of photos at once.