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New Site Up

One of the sites I worked on in the last month or so has launched. The Ann Arbor Board of Realtors were looking to redesign their current site and Inner Circle Media was the firm that they felt would do it right. Luckily this was while I was working in their office and they graciously let me do the front-end development for the project.

I loved creating this site, its a great design especially compared to the other Realtor web sites that I have seen when googling to check out the competition. Not only was the design the reason I loved creating this site, but because of the fact I was able to create it as a flexible width layout. Throughout my freelance career the designers have always created fixed width designs but I felt that this site could be created flexible and not have any serious issues with the design and the great people at Inner Circle were all for it. The site is also built with Ruby on Rails and Inner Circle even created a custom content management system, so the board can easily update their site content and it gives them a lot of cool modules that make it a great data driven site.

They told me that the Board of realtor’s all over the country have a competition each year for who has the best website, hopefully with such a great design, use of great front-end techniques and such a powerful back-end based on rails will put the Ann Arbor Board of Realtors at the top of the list.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Web Development, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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4 Responses to “New Site Up”

  1. Ross Johnson Says:
    February 27th, 2007 at 7:50 am

    Definitely an improvement. The old one was pretty well dated in terms of design and technology.

  2. Dan Shields Says:
    February 27th, 2007 at 6:06 pm

    Yeah it was pretty horrible. Who creates a site that has a horizontal scroll bar no matter what resolution!!

    I know your probably thinking there is to many container divs for the corners but I just decided that was the best approach for the time given to create the templates and didn’t want to do a javascript approach.

  3. Ross Johnson Says:
    February 28th, 2007 at 2:52 pm

    Actually I came to the same conclusion, and the code is still clean and efficient.

    I know a lot of developers look for javascript as an easy solution to avoid “div-itous” but in many cases that simple enlarges the download footprint and time for majority of the users.

    Great coding!

  4. Dan Shields Says:
    February 28th, 2007 at 11:05 pm

    Thanks Ross, wish I would of saw you post that before saying the same thing to you at the refresh meeting! :)

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