CrownJewelEvents.com
The Evaluation
This project was a little different than most of the work we handle. 
It all started at about 1am on a random weeknight, I believe it was a Tuesday. I was sitting at my desk finishing up some work and preparing for a little vacation I was heading out on the next morning. As I was wrapping up and getting ready for bed, I received a facebook message (another example of how facebook is not only an office work diversion but a great networking tool) from an acquaintance whom I had met while working for someone else. Carmella, the owner of event planning company Crown Jewel Events had commissioned another firm to build her new site recently, and it was now broken and needed a fix. The blog portion of the site was completely non existent, and the gallery page was returning errors and just not working. Carmela also had no way to update the site on her own or add new content, she had no control whatsoever over her web presence. As if that were not enough, the company she used to build her site was also her host, and of course they went out of business, leaving her to scramble and fend for herself for a week trying to procure hosting and transfer the site on her own, which was a daunting task for her as it would be for most people who aren’t web developers. This is where I came into the picture. She needed someone to get her gallery back on track and set up the blogging page on her site.
The Process
We don’t like to work on existing sites as a general rule, it becomes a nightmare to untangle someone else’s work and is very difficult having to support something built by someone else. Logistical problems always pop up and it becomes a blame game between the last developer, the current developer, the host, and the client, and in the end even if we win the argument, we have a client with a broken site, so we still lose. Still, I saw Carmella struggling and wanted to help get her on track as quickly as possible. I got into her files and saw that the blog was never set up to begin with, and the gallery was based on some proprietary flash-based script that the former designer/hosting company used, so the gallery was going to have to be rebuilt.
After speaking to Carmella, I also deduced that whatever new hosting company she went to was not a good fit for her. They gave her absolutely no support whatsoever during her transfer, while a lot of reputable hosts would not only give better support, but also provide site transfers at minimal to no cost. The issues she had with attempting the transfer herself sent up red flags that she should not be using this service. I researched her hosting agreement and saw that a 100% refund was possible, so I suggested getting that refund and going with a better (and cheaper) host that I knew would not be going out of business and leaving her hanging again.
After spending a few moments looking through Carmella’s files, I realized that it would take about the same amount of time to recreate her whole site using wordpress as it would be to just create the blog and gallery pages. She was more than happy with the look and layout of her site and didn’t want to spend the time or money redesigning it, so all I had to do was migrate from a static html site to a custom skin on top of wordpress that looked the same. The benefit to this would be that she would now have 100% control of the site, with the ability to easily add photos, content, and blog posts describing her events, with a web interface and no need for coding. The site would also be built on open source architecture and easily upgraded and moved.
The finished fully migrated site is a clone of her original site, we did none of the design or graphics work, but we did have to build a custom wordpress skin using those design elements and build a structure that worked just as the site originally did. The site is now future proof and easy for a computer novice to update and administer.
Some of the interesting design elements:
- Facebook and twitter buttons linking the site to those popular social networking platforms.
- Gallery. The client can now add some of her best shots to the gallery light box easily.
- An events/blog page. We set up a page where the client can easily update the site to include announcements on special events or anything else they want to share on the site.
- Rotating image box. Every page on the site now has an image box in the right corner that randomly changes whenever a page is loaded.
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