Frommer's Xiamen

With photos from his recent trip to Xiamen, Kerwin visually upgraded the small online destination guide at Frommers.com. The main page displays Garden Show Park and a historic street on Gulang Yu. The slideshow, which was a new feature added to Frommers.com in November, has more photos of Garden Show Park, Gulang Yu and Zhongshan Lu.

Click here for Frommer's Xiamen

Wesley's Baptism DVD Cover

Wesley's Baptism adds some variety to the DVD Covers on Dragonsaber since it's the first non-travel one and it features people rather than landscapes and skylines. These compositions tend to be more challenging because it's more involved than finding a nice cityscape with enough negative space to place the text. The people must be featured prominently. And in many cases, photos have many other obstacles to work the text around. In this piece, part of the background had to be rendered using a different photo. For more details, click here.

RCT Q4 2007 Updates

RCT started taking advantage of the new News section and redesigned homepage right away. We recently posted 2 news articles and were able to get the most recent one into the homepage without having to make adjustments or workarounds. The homepage image was also just swapped out. Since it's such a large graphic, any updates to that image give the homepage a fresh new look. Click here to visit RCT.

509 W. 122nd St.

A new Upper West Side apartment was added to the 38th Avenue Realty website. This listing makes use of Google Maps and Picasa Web Album for quick web development turnaround.

It's a 1-bedroom apartment in Morningside Heights. For details, photos, floorplan and map, click here.

The Round Table

The Round Table page has always contained links to fellow artists' websites. It was recently updated with links to online photo galleries of photographers as well. New links include photo galleries of Andrew Siy, Fenix 21, FHWing and Lewis 11354. James Li's Wonderham was also added.

Click Here for the Round Table

Google CSE Black

The Google CSE search box in the rightnav has been updated to match the look and feel of this new site. Just like the blue version of the search form on Dragonsaber, customizing this one involved downloading the Google search JavaScript and watermark. A custom style was added to display a black background. And the watermark was also recolored. Since the script is no longer pulled from Google's server, it means that a manual update must be made if they make an update on their end, but since this is an artist's site, the look and feel is of primary importance.

Web Design & Dev. Links

The Web Design & Development Link database has been updated. Some of the previous companies listed changed ownerships (and URLs). More web-based tools like Google CSE and Grazr were added after use on Dragonsaber. Other additions include TaskMerlin, Hostek and NYCFUG.

Click Here for the Complete List

Dragonsaber Red

The About Dragonsaber section was also reformatted to make room for the design of this news feed. In this subsection, you'll find information about Dragonsaber Red's design and the influences that led to it.

Details of Dragonsaber Red

Dragonsaber Blue

A couple of slight adjustments to the About Dragonsaber page:

The subsection describing the site was renamed to Dragonsaber Blue and was reformatted to match the style of the Web Design Portfolio. This piece of content could really belong in the gallery or the about section, hence the mixed format.

The "Mini Browser" section was removed since it wasn't really as important as describing the design of the site. It's just a neat way to use IFRAMEs to similate a small browser window.

Details of Dragonsaber Blue

Contact Us

A feedback form was just added to the About section. Now you can contact us for website corrections, feedback and technical support. The Name, email and subject fields are required. The form is handled by ColdFusion and JavaScript on the backend.

Click Here to Contact Us

Rightnav Search Box

The Google CSE for Dragonsaber was just added to this site. You can find it at the top of the right navigation column. This is the same search found on the website. It does not search this blog. For now, the blog is meant to promote the site. So the concentration will be on sending traffic from here to the site rather than the other way around.

Webmaster for Strata-Art

As of August, Kerwin Siy has taken over Webmaster duties of Strata Art, the web portfolio of Richard Fox. So this site was added to Dragonsaber's "Coding-Only" Gallery. So far, minor HTML updates were implemented and a system for converting hi-res scans into Strata Art's web style was created to make future updates as efficient as possible.

Click here for Strata Art

Blogger Integration (Stage 1)

Stage 1 of Dragonsaber's Blogger integration is complete. The old manually created RSS feed has been removed and replaced with the Atom & RSS feeds of Dragonsaber News. So if you visit the Dragonsaber homepage, your browser (Firefox, SeaMonkey, Safari RSS & IE7) will detect the feed from Blogger. A "News" link has also been added to the footer and sitemap.

Future plans will involve a design update for the top navigation and a redesign of the homepage.

Google CSE

A Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) has been added to Dragonsaber! Now you can simply type in a search term at the bottom of any page and a bunch of results will show up using Google's search index. The best part about this is Google CSE does this without leaving the Dragonsaber site. The look and feel of both the search box (this took a bit of hacking to get the custom background color and blue Google logo) and the results page were customized to match the Dragonsaber design.

NightShift 2007

RCT Performance participates in the annual NightShift show/competition. This year, it was held in Belmont Park on July 21. The photo gallery for this event was added to the website shortly after the redesign. Since the site was already brand new, the way the gallery works was also reworked. If you check out the older galleries, you'll notice that clicking on each photo opens a seperate HTML file. In this new gallery, there's a JavaScript that renders the popup dynamically by passing a bunch of values.

Click here to check out the NightShift 2007 Gallery

KEY 2007

A Walk in the Garden was given a design update in June to make room for growth. There was no need to change the look and feel because the wood and trellis elements already matched the paintings without detracting from them. The content pages were given a more symmetrical design and the top navigation was rearranged so that there would be more space for the site sections. One major information architecture change was splitting the artwork into 2 main categories... Paintings & Prints.

The backend was also reworked as each painting has been databased and is served up dynamically with ColdFusion. This setup will increase the efficiency of updates. Click here for more info. on A Walk in the Garden at the Dragonsaber Gallery.

RCT 2007

RCT Performance's website was completely redesigned in April/May. The previous version of the site was a marketing-centric design that featured the gallery. There were a lot of graphics and almost no content. Since RCT has made a name for itself over the past 4 years in the import tuning industry, it was time to upgrade the site. The information architecture changed as more pages that covered product lines were added. A much needed news section was brought up from the old about section. It was given a more modern looking, wider layout, with enough room for nice photos as well as content. The design elements were made to resemble automotive parts. Click here to visit RCT at the Dragonsaber Gallery.

Introduction to Dragonsaber News

This blog is a news feed for Dragonsaber. It will contain updates to the site and other sites created or managed by Kerwin Siy. After much though, Blogger was chosen as the platform for this project because it has an established community that could potentially open up some new traffic for Dragonsaber. It's also a well developed content management system that's been around for several years.