Fantastic

... the LiveCD is on a DVD, the DVD drive won't show, burn to CD-R twice (the first blank fails), boot from CD, USB devices don't show, reboot, add PS2 devices, only the PS2 keyboard and USB mouse want work, SATA drives don't show, in some universe the RAID controller lets you clone a drive (not this one, or if it does it doesn't want you to know), subsequently determine source drive has little point to exist and really doesn't need to be copied, leave client hours later, greeted by crowd of people in lobby all wondering what its like to have dependable elevators, take 12 flights of stairs, return to no internet and a board intern, send intern home, call Verizon, determine internal router decided to forget how it was configured, re-educate router, Vonage adapter decides it too should stop normal functions, statically assign adapter so the phones work.

Net Gain from 3 PM to 11:30 PM: Zero.

HadarMetalDesign.com

Working with our friends at Mogollon we just wrapped up Hadar Metal Design. Mogollon provided the clean industrial design and we did the rest in [valid] HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS.

We made use of JavaScript to perform in-page scrolling, where Flash might have otherwise been used. This keeps the content accessible to all users, and even better, to search engines, err I mean Google. We also tried to keep the markup as semantic as possible to give the site the best chance of being properly indexed with context. It's probably not as pure as it could have been, we ended up using tables for the scrolling portions so we didn't have to rely on endless browser hacks. Actually the CSS is relatively hack free.

TheoryEvents.com

Another site that we just finished up and that launched (unofficially) today was TheoryEvents.com for our friends at TheoryNYC. They needed a very simple site that would let them make frequent announcements, and they needed it fast.

Armed with a few photos and a conceptual outline we threw a site together in short order. We chose Blogger to power the main page because it gave them a simple way to post upcoming events, automatic archiving and RSS feeds. We could have gone the Moveable Type or WordPress route, but who wants to manage all that if you don't have to.

MartiniPark.com

One of the sites that we finished up recently was Martini Park (no relation). Before you start gushing over its smooth look, I have to mention that CoolBirth was responsible for the graphics, base HTML, and CSS. Our business was to hook them up with a very custom CMS.

The CMS provides them with the ability to spawn sub-sites based on a master template. This lets them create new sites at will, all managed within the CMS, yet still be able make each individual site unique. They can create location specific galleries and events as well as items that appear across all sites. All this through one simple unified interface, not your typical Swiss Army Knife that can do everything but nothing really well. Have you ever tried to cut with one of those?

Locations Magazine

Big News! Firefallpro has another major project under it's belt. A large portion of the work we do is maintenance work for existing sites, or general development work. However, we have a steady diet of new websites as well, and one of them was finished last week.

LocationsMagazine.com is the online counterpart of Locations Magazine, which is a yearly magazine featuring write ups and feature listings on hundreds of locations, caterers and other services. It has been published since 1993, and focuses almost exclusively on weddings and other high end events taking place in the New York and New Jersey area.

Our work for the site involved redesigning it completely from the ground up. We took the old messy ASP code and threw it away, and developed clean, standards compliant PHP code. We use CSS heavily in our new layout, and as a result several key features have been met:

* Better search engine indexing
The site has been indexed many times more frequently compared to the old site. In addition, the page rank for certain keywords has been increasing as google re-calculates.
* Increased Performance
year over year, for the month of june we saw an 80% increase in page views, 50% increase in visits, 10% increase in hits, and 35% decrease in bandwidth. This means more new people are coming, they're staying longer, and the server is working far far more efficiently.
* Increased traffic rank
according to alexa (I know, I know, it's a bad indicator, but it's still an indicator) the traffic rank for the site has gone up 10%.

And that's just the front end! We had some severe limitations on what we could do with the front end, as they wanted the look and feel to be the same as before. This meant that about the biggest change we were allowed to make was to turn the poetry section into DHTML from flash.

BUT, on the backend, we worked wonders (alliteration, go me!) The old site was slow moving, and bogged down with enormous forms containing every detail for each account. The new backend is fast, sleek, and totally AJAX, baby. This was the first project we've done in AJAX, and I must say I'm proud of it. Menus are responsive, reports come in faster, it's entirely cross-browser compatible, and everything is edit in place. I look forward to more projects that let us flex our muscles like this did.

In closing, go check out the site, link to it, and tell your friends. If I get approval, I'll go ahead and post some pics and things we learned in building the backend.

Total stats: 15,000 lines of original code, 15,000 lines of OSS code, and 0 errors or warnings.

EDIT: fixed the link. I'm retarded.