http://tapasgitana.com/

Design by: http://1618creative.com/

Another site went live this week, this time for the restaurant Tapas Gitana. Before working on this project I actually had the pleasure of dining at their Northfield location after purchasing the groupon. Everything I had there was tastey. Becky is a vegetarian and there were many delicious choices for her and I to share. One of my favorite plates, although non-vegi friendly, had to be the Dátiles Con Tocino, which are bacon wrapped dates over red pepper cream sauce. Heaven.

This site is actually a revamp. The previous site was a static html site. The new version, along with an updated design, is now using our CMS system. Most of the site is pretty straight forward but here are some noteworthy items:

1. First the most noticeable is the navigation. It is a horizontal drop down, and can drop down 2 separate levels, and each being slightly offset and has a background image appearing to cut at a 45 degree angle. They also stretch all the way to the right no matter the parent item it appears under. It is using both CSS and javascript to accomplish the look.
2. Not as noticeable but perhaps the neatest are the context sensitive templates. Tapas Gitana has 2 different locations: Northfield and Chicago. A particular page will talk about one of the two locations, such as the menus or gallery. The design calls for displaying the address and reservation link near the bottom, depending on which location the page is referencing. I didn’t want to have the admin user cumbersomely fill this information out each time. Instead the template will display the correct address and reservation link by knowing if it is a Northfield page or a Chicago page automatically. The templates accomplish this simply by looking for one of the two locations in the url. For example: “/menu/northfield/cold-tapas” will render the Northfield information, while “/gallery/chicago” will render the Chicago information. A simple naming convention like this can save everyone a lot of time.
3. The last feature I’ll talk about is the reservation system. This particular system was already in place on the old site. The challenge was we were now adding the new Chicago location. The 3rd party system works by loading an external flash file in a popup lightbox. All the code is self contained and just takes different parameters depending on the restaurant. The reservation anchor tags themselves just use a Chicago or Northfield CSS class, which few lines of jQuery look at to determine which parameters to pass into the reservation system.

Wow wee, that is two restaurant site launches in the same week. It is a good week.

http://techniquerestaurant.com/

Technique is the brand new name of the Restaurants of Le Cordon Bleu culinary school campuses across the United States. Many of the schools already had a restaurant that the students worked in, but they wanted to standardize the names and the menus of each and rebrand it Technique.

I was tasked with implementing the new site’s design into HTML. It is a straight forward, elegant and simple design. The site was designed to let the pictures do much of the talking, as apparent with the large photographs on each page. We utilize slide shows on the home page, gallery and they are soon to be used on each of the location pages. The right text column uses thin custom scrollbars when needed. The navigation is a simple transparent, drop down style menu.

Overall I’m excited with the way the site turned out and can’t wait to work with the Career Education Corporation in the future.

To start something like a blog, it can take overcoming many mental hurdles. First you think about what do you want to talk about. Will anybody care? Will you care if anybody cares? Second what do you want it to look like? After all, a blog is going to be a reflection of yourself. This was my thought process as a web developer anyways. I have tons of mockup screenshots of what my dream blog would look like. For some reason, they never get implemented. And every few months, the process repeats.

“Self, you really should have a blog.”
“Why is that self?”
“Well, you really need to get yourself out there”
“What would you talk about? What would it look like?”
“Good question, lets open up photoshop, muck around for a few days and dwell on it.”

Let’s be honest. Dwelling is synonymous with procrastinating. By not acting on something right now and allowing it to “simmer” you are simply putting it off. And by you, I mean me.

Dwell no longer, here are the answers I self-imposed:

What are you going to write about?

You are going to drop some wisdom on everyone. Wisdom that your 28-year-old bad self has stumbled upon over your 15 year web development experience. Wisdom from living on the south side of Chicago. Wisdom about which pizza and beer are the best ones. Wisdom of how to school your friends in a game of Settlers of Catan or scoring all the coins in New Super Mario Bros. Stuff like that. tl;dr – Everything.

Will anybody care? Maybe. Do I care? Ya, kinda. I should.

What will it look like? It doesn’t matter, I can always change it later. Here is what I did.

1. Logged into my web hosting account’s cpanel.
2. Went to Fantastico, and installed WordPress.
3. Searched for a theme. (I typed in yellow.)
4. Found one I liked in the first minute and installed it. This theme isn’t even yellow. It can be customized later.

Everything took a total of 20 minutes to setup. As an aside, I think this theme pretty cool. It changes colors every time you refresh. It is like an old Atari 2600 where you could pull a lever and change the color palate on your game of Combat.

Anyways, content is king right? It’s my hope that over time, the content published here will dictate what the blog will look like and what features it will need. A designer that I admire at 37signals, Ryan Singer @rjs, talks about designing from the inside-out. Focus on your focus first. Don’t spend a week designing your logo, header graphics and navigation only to fill in your content as an afterthought with a 10pt font in a content area 250px wide. Start with the meat and potatoes, and move out from there.

And if you are happy with an already built theme, more power to you. Just remember you can always change it later. At risk of being too wordy, I’ll stop here. Look at you, you’re publishing! If anyone needs help setting up a blog of their own or help with an existing blog, just let me know. Use coupon code: STEVEPBLOG20. Phew, so now that this awkward first post is finally out of the way, let’s get started…