Coming Soon — TheGypsyCafe.com

It is my pleasure to announce the official opening (here) of “The Gypsy Café ” — the follow-on to “The Café @ Groton Trading Co.”, represented by my first .NET web site until my clients closed up shop at the end of Februrary 2009. In its next reincarnation, with a new style and gypsy flair, the new café (physically) will be at 112 Main St., (Paugus Mall, Route 113), Pepperell, Ma.

In cyberspace, the new site will be my first opportunity to demonstrate the re-usable blueprint that I created using Microsoft's .NET technology to increase my productivity at creating one rich web site from another.

The picture to the left features the new logo (just the top part) — the harbinger of an exciting new beginning for my clients, Keith and Christina Doucette. I added a border and address/contact information to that, ostensibly for presentation (to make it more square) but also to make it more standalone.

Further details are available in the "Testimonial" that I wrote in the old web site to point the way to the new web site: TheGypsyCafe.com (officially opened June 3^rd) to encourage customers to give it a try.

DigitalMediaMagik.com Gets a Facelift

The website is not completely finished yet, but the facelift is pretty much complete so I will take the "Easter / Holy week milestone" as my cut-off point to declare the facelift complete.

• Cross-browser support: The site (and blog) now work with a very broad spectrum of popular browsers including IE (Microsoft's Internet Explorer), FireFox (Mozilla), Safari (Apple), and Chrome (Google). Up-to-date browser usage statistics peg this coverage at 97%.



• A panorama animation on DigitalMediaMagik.com gives the pages a "constant width" and showcases one of my services — making panoramas from multiple digital snapshots



• To accomodate smaller screens, there is an "X" action on the right-hand side of the panorama animation which makes it disappear and the page redraws so you can read more without having to scroll.



• The former "menu tree", on the left-hand side of all the pages, has been replaced with something much simpler. The "Community / TalkAbout" icon — an extension of that menu — was reworked to 'fit' better and to reflect the new DigitalMediaMagik.com logo.



• I elaborated the previously-empty page about my StoryBoard (video) product, celebrating a project I did for my sister's 60^th birthday.



• My "community" space — these pages — still have the same web address (blog.DigitalMediaMagik.com) but the blog has been rehosted, I got caught up wrt my backlog of articles, and I created a customized template to give the blog a much more pleasing and accessable format. For comparison, the old blog is still there… but there are no links to it ☺; the final article therein details the rehosting.



• There are a number of new "Page Elements" in the blog sidebar, including my DigitalMediaMagik.com Twitter "feed" and more About Me.
  

My New Business Cards

Coincident with “The Ides of March”… as of today I can present a sneak preview of my new business card, shown on the right. My 2^nd-generation design, the goal with this card was to deliver a more accurate picture of what DigitalMediaMagik.com is all about. The card reflects the two aspects of my business as they have evolved — website design and working with digital media. Some website designs call for both of these activities, but basically they are two different lines of business. Likewise my products vs consulting activities are just another way to reach a larger clientele.

Because the art of creating panoramas is typically just a little beyond the reach of most individuals, I have long wanted a business card that features a panorama, even though there is a huge difference in the typical print size for the two formats. Be that as it may, I was pleasantly surprised to see that even the panorama caption comes out readable on the card itself, which you can clearly see if you click thru the above graphic.

Creating the design for these cards — the dilemma of which panorama to use — gave me the idea of using multiple panoramas in a new masthead for my company site where I plan to feature a panorama animation. As an added bonus, the back side of each card shows the year in which DigitalMediaMagik.com is going to burst onto the multimedia scene as a powerhouse of personal expression and communication.

Official Opening of The Café Website

Though my first client web site, “The Café @ Groton Trading Company ”, has been accessible on the web for quite a while, today marks the official opening of the site, a snapshot of which you see here on the right. The site features the full menu for The Café, broken down into "food category" in the left-hand menu, and then a set of "pages" within each category which you navigate via a top-of-page menu — all of which I designed to convey the web experience, even though the actual menu is really a "huge long .pdf document" designed to be glossy-printed for hand viewing at your table.

More traditional features of the website include "customer feedback" where clients can tell us what they think as well as sign up for the newsletter, “Daily Specials ” on a chalkboard background (to match what is actually in The Café), and a Flickr-hosted "Photo Gallery" which we wanted in order to take advantage of The Café being inside an antique store making its ambiance is truly unique.

Customer Testimonials : Another unique feature of this web site is what you see on the left — the page that I called "Community". At a glance, it is a set of "feedback stories", each one generally displayed with a thumbnail picture of the client who submitted the feedback by going to another page (not shown) where you sign up for a newsletter and/or write whatever "story" you want to submit regarding your experience at The Café. Therein, a checkbox lets the author of such feedback consent to having his feedback made public on the “Community ” page, which is generated as dynamic content from the database each time someone brings up the page. For more details see moderated testimonials described here.

On a different technical note… I designed and built this website, soup-to-nuts, using Microsoft's .NET technology primarily because that way I end up with a site implementation that is fluid and completely under my control. Moreover, since extensive use is made of “page templates ”, even pervasive changes to the site — as clients get a better idea of the look and feel they want — sitewide changes can be made quickly and reliably.