This is The World According to Buchs - Keepin’ it moving since 2003!

I made mention recently about the frustration of being primarily a web developer. The bulk of the work I do goes into building CMS tools for my clients to manage their sites - the kind of thing that has a password on it and I can’t exactly post a link to it. Screenshots are nice, but don’t do the work justice. I’ve also worked on some top-secret market research projects recently - I can’t even post screenshots of that work.

But, every now and then, I get to actually do some design work. My good friend Chris Carter hired me to redesign his consulting firm’s website. It took much longer than expected, but the end result was worth it. I wrote a little bit about it on my business site, or you can check out his brand spankin’ new site for yourself.

Among other things, this site is XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant — which was no trivial matter — and the CSS should look identical in both IE and Firefox (if anyone sees any oddities in Safari, let me know). There’s a little bit of Flash used to handle preloading of some masthead images, which was fun to learn; my knowledge of Flash is rapidly increasing. And the content management system is an evolution of the system I recently did for the Ellington’s site. This tool generates static pages via a templating system I came up with, and really gives Chris some flexibility in what he does with the site.

All in all, I’m extremely damn happy with everything. Well, except maybe the final total on his invoice - the “friend rate” is a pretty sweet deal!