Project83 Blog - Commentary on web development, standards and small business » 2007

February 26th, 2007

[SHOWCASE] Nancy Quarcelino School of Golf

Recently we launched another project for a client we are very excited about, the Nancy Quarcelino School of Golf. This school, located south of Nashville, TN, has two incredible teachers that are among the best in America at what they do.

My favorite part of the site is the functionality of the navigation/sub-navigation area. Designers can hardly ever go wrong from a usability standpoint in using some form of tabbed navigation, because it is instantly familiar to most computer users. The tabs, combined with a bright sub-navigation on interior pages made for a simple structure that is painfully easy to use. Note the use of “active” and “rollover” states with each link, which also gives the user more certainty with navigation.

To give this project a little perspective, here is a screenshot of their site before the redesign, and then of the final design we went live with.

Homepage (before)

Quarcelino School of Golf (before)

Homepage (after)

Quarcelino School of Golf (before)

Posted in Showcase - No Comments

February 23rd, 2007

Remarkable Customer Service

Customer service is something I can always get excited about, and is something I try to emphasize a great deal at Project83. Maybe it’s from the years of waiting tables throughout college, or maybe because I know how great it feels to experience great service as a customer.

Joel Spolsky has just written a fantastic article on customer service, and I consider it a must-read for anyone in a service industry. Those of you looking for practical ways to build a great company can start with these seven principles.

Posted in Business - No Comments

February 7th, 2007

jQuery and InnerFade

One can easily be overwhelmed by the sheer number of javascript libraries out there these days. Is there one better than all the others? For someone that just tries to bluff my way through DOM Scripting without bothering our developer Denny, I have found jQuery in particular to be really fun and simple.

As of late, Denny and I both started using the jQuery library for little things here and there. Despite what others are using, I find the xhtml markup to be simple and intuitive. It’s also very quick, weighing in at only 55k. Some of the great demos showcase how easy it really is to use jQuery for yourself.

My favorite jQuery demo as of late has to be InnerFade, from medienfreunde. I would give them more credit, but their website is not in English :-). This page shows how simple it can be to create fantastic slideshows and such with simple front-end code.

We are also big fans of thickbox, in case you have not visited the showcase portion of our website.

Any other jQuery demos out there we should be aware of? Opinions on other javascript libraries?

Posted in Web Development - 3 Comments

February 3rd, 2007

[SHOWCASE] dinette.com

This week we launched a project that we had been hard at work on for a number of months. Dinette.com is one of the leading furniture stores on the web in selling quality dinette sets, and we helped them with their first redesign in about five years. We also completely re-worked their checkout process to increase conversion and minimize cart abandonment.

I hope to do a more detailed case study of the work done on dinette.com in the future, but for now we just wanted to provide a few before/after screenshots of the site. Make sure you visit and check everything out for yourself, we really had fun working on this project.