Things have been pretty busy around here at Frye / Wiles, one reason is the new site for drdevinbinder.com. Dr. Binder is a neurosurgeon who specializes in brain and spine surgery who wanted a sophisticated personal website that would stand out from his colleagues, a way for new users to know more about him, and a site where other doctors can send potential patients.

Some functionality that was added to the CMS was a nice page slider for the location link, which showed his two offices where he practices. We thought it was a nice and easy way for the user to stay on any page and see where his contact information is. Another great custom functionality we also created was on the publications page where there is a file sorter for all his unique publications. We believed by cutting the use of internal page links we made it more user friendly and a nice interactive way to show all his works.

Coming soon: Dr. Devin Binder’s research site.

These four, by Martha Ormiston, with her comments inline:

“The EZ Student Life logo is classically collegiate, represented by the graduation cap and also the font which is a throwback to old varsity jackets. The blue and orange colors used in the logo are complementary and make the logo stand out, while also creating an aesthetically pleasing feeling in the viewer. ”

“The logo for MM Real Estate is inspired from lion door knockers. The lion head conveys reliability and strength, and the lion being part of a door knocker expresses a welcoming feeling. The font is reminiscent of text found on old roman sculptures, thus conveying dedication and dependability.”

“The logo for Devin K. Binder, M.D, Ph.D., is a modern rendition of a brain and spine using geometric shapes and negative space. The scrub blue color is used to convey professional medical branding by referencing the blue scrub uniforms worn in the operating room.”

“The Gold Sparrow logo is a minimalistic representation of a Sudan Golden Sparrow using the colors gold and brown. The serif font conveys traditional and classic, while the use of all capitals makes the company name both attention grabbing and bold. ”

And a couple from Dani Cabrera:

We’ve been a bit quiet on our blog recently, but we’re still here - just working on some longer-term projects.  Hopefully we’ll get more blog-active pretty soon, but work comes first!

Anyway, I thought I would share one of the things we are working on - the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival.  As some of you know, we started working with Film Independent, the parent company of the LA Film Fest, last year on the 2010 Film Fest website.  That worked out well, and we’ve been doing lots of little projects for them in the meantime, including web support for many major events such as the 2011 Spirit Awards.

Since we have a good handle on the Film Festival part of the business, we were asked once again to handle the web presence for the event for 2011.   Film festival websites are interesting projects, because they are quite transient and impermanent.  They generally go through multiple phases aimed at totally separate audiences (sponsors, members, general public, and then time-of-event news reporting and sales).  And then, as quickly as they show up, they become mostly irrelevant shortly after the festival is over.  All this makes for interesting work!  Anyway, here’s an early phase of the site - the micro-site to support pass sales.  Check it out (and all future phases) at http://www.lafilmfest.com We’ll update as new phases go up!

We recently launched the State Street Pilates website for this great Pilates studio in downtown Redlands.  Not a complex site, but a good project nonetheless.  Check it out today »

We are very pleased to announce that the re-designed website for the Urology Center of Southern California has been launched.  The UCOSC has several locations all over Southern California, providing comprehensive and innovative urological services for their patients.  Check out their brand new website here.

We’re proud to have had the opportunity to work on the Film Independent Talent Guide website.  This site is a searchable database of filmmakers who have gone through the Film Independent Talent Development program, with the intention of connecting filmmakers of various sorts with industry projects.  Take a look

We’re happy to announce the launch of the new Janet Goeske Foundation website.  JGF is a great non-profit in southern California dedicated to helping improve the quality of life for seniors, and the new website is intended to support their fund-raising efforts toward this goal.  Take a look, and take the pledge!

My laptop died last night.  It was an undignified death, with the loud internal fan wheezing and gasping for air as I attempting to type out a simple email.  The situation was this: mid-word, my computer failed to complete what I was inputting into its innards and like usual, I waited for the silver brick to just catch up to where I left off.  It’s not that I’m a fast typist as much as my Dell Inspiron 6000 has a chronic case of Alzheimer’s.  Last night it forgot to work; it forgot that it had a hard drive.

The so-called blue screen of death appeared, informing me that a problem has been detected and to make sure all of my hardware was properly installed, and if so, restart the computer.  It also had a slew of other PC jive nonsense at the bottom of the screen that no one but the Vicki robot from the Small Wonder 80’s sitcom would understand.  I restarted it, hoping it was just another case of whopping cough that she gets, only to find out that my state of the art Windows XP operating system circa 2005 wouldn’t boot up like it normally does; something it preventing it from functioning properly.

Starting to panic a little, I tried a few times to have it boot from the other boot options that the blue screen menu was giving me to see if that helped: it didn’t.  I hopped on the still functional iMac upstairs to see if any online tips would pull me out from the blue PC abyss but nothing seemed approachable; all the helper websites would tell me to re-install windows via a USB drive but there was just one too many abbreviated tech words sprinkled in the instructions for my liking such as NTLDR and NTFS.  I’m not exactly certified in this area so I call Dell tech support; well Dell is of no help because my warranty is years past expired and I would have to pay them $60 to have someone of questionable command of the English language walk me through over the phone, a checklist of things that could possibly, maybe, semi-probably, help with the situation.

No dice Dell.  Additionally, Dell’s tech support web page is also woefully inadequate to handle issues such as these.

Now, at this point I’m starting to panic good and well, because though I lost that loving feeling for my Inspiron 6000 years ago when I cheated on her with the sleek, and modern and whisper quiet iMac (silence is golden, am I right?), I am also an idiot; the vast majority of pictures that I’ve amassed over the last five years or so are on that laptop and not yet transferred to the external hard drive that’s been sitting in my living room for the past eight or so months.  I need to be strung up and stoned for this lackadaisical oversight, and I’m not talking about an herbal remedy.  All 28 gigs of my music are also trapped on malfunctioning machine, but I’m not as concerned about that since there are ways to get those MP3 files off the iPod’s themselves.  The pictures are what’s important, as well as some documents that I’d like to recover, but the computer itself is worth little to me or anyone else.

After calling a few local places, I ended up hiring a local computer repair guy based on a friend’s recommendation - Phillip Bishop of computer repair of Greensboro - to come out and see if he could get past the blue screen of death and retrieve my files.  He came out to my house this morning and did everything he could but in the end, the hard drive was corrupted and not able to open up on any other computer despite multiple attempts at doing so.  We both felt like it so was close to working, like the beating heart of the patient was there, it simply was unable to pump out enough juice through the computer to open up and save any data.

Flatlined.

Yeah, I’m not happy about any of this:  Dell’s shoddy computers/ customer service, the Hitachi made hard drive, my lazy, forgetful ineptitude.  My options at this point are limited to sending the dead hard drive to a data recovery center and shell out a few hundred to save my pictures and files or much like Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club after Tyler Durden kisses his hand and pours lye on it, let it all go.  Regardless, one thing I know for sure, I’m done with PC’s for the time being.  No more BIOS or FAT32 or Windows based anything; I’m out.  No electronics product is infallible, especially not these days, but PC’s seem especially prone to these types of destructive events, as they enjoy a life expectancy of a goldfish.

In the end, as a consumer you pay a premium for Apple products up front, but you pay a much higher premium, one way or another, as a PC consumer on the backend.  And that’s with or without consumer incompetence as exemplified by my not utilizing a perfectly good external hard drive.

Over the past few months we’ve had the opportunity to work on another web app with the Schakra GoGoStat team, GoGoStat Parental Guidance.  This is a Facebook application which allows parents to monitor the social activity of their children on Facebook - so for example, parents are notified if their kids post personal information, or if bad words are flagged in status messages.  Parents can also see what photos their kids have been posting, who they are befriending (and where those friends come from, and how old they are).  As an added bonus, there is an Emergency Report feature, which allows parents to quickly print out a report of all of their kid’s activity over the past month.

For this particular app, we worked very closely with the development team at Schakra, and were responsible for UX, design and front end development including HTML, CSS, Javascript and ASP.NET.  This was a very challenging and rewarding project for us, and we are grateful for the opportunity!

Check out GoGoStat Parental Guidance today >

We’re happy to announce the launch of the new Yerba Buena Engineering website.  Yerba Buena is a prominent San Francisco-based engineering firm, and they needed a website to match.  Check it out today >