Wiley China is actually a minisite of Wiley.com US used for marketing purposes. As you can see with the old site, it was out of date for some time already. It needed some new templates to handle features more easily and in a more fixed manner. The new site was divided up and organized so that it would save time for non-technical editors. At the same time, it keeps the look consistent with the mother site.
Before
As part of a partnership with TED, Wiley had a minisite setup under their main Wiley.com. Unlike most minisites, this one used the same header and footer as the main site, so it saved a bit of time in coding the templates.
These are some pretty useful and convenient tools for testing how
responsive web sites resize and reconfigure for various device widths:
The Responsinator
- Enter a responsive site URL into the form field
- Submit to see a simulation across various device widths & orientations
Benjamin Keen's Bookmarklet
- Install the bookmark by dragging the link to your bookmark bar
- Visit a responsive site
- Click on the bookmark for a set of IFRAME previews
Victor Coulon's Bookmarklet
- Install the bookmark by dragging the link to your bookmark bar
- Visit a responsive site
- Click on the bookmark for an interactive preview in a single IFRAME
- Use the links above to resize the IFRAME
Examples:
- http://foodsense.is
- http://spigotdesign.com
- http://www.authenticjobs.com
- http://www.getskeleton.com
It's been a while since Wiley.com had a redesign... long before I started working there. I'm almost constantly redesigning sites or launching brand new ones at work, but this one was by far the largest one I've done. It wasn't the most technically difficult, but the amount of content and various page types made the project time consuming. This was so heavy on the frontend that 3 of our developers dropped their normal backend duties to help me out.
Vermont's Contemporary Traditions
Southern Vermont Arts Center
Yesterhouse Galleries
September 8 - 30, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday Sept. 8, 2 - 4pm
For more details visit www.svac.org
A Painted Garden
Mount Kisco Public Library
July 6 - 30, 2013
Opening Reception: Saturday July 6, 1 - 3pm
For more details visit www.mountkiscolibrary.org
Updated Complete Exhibitions List
Pick Up Your Tires
Now you can order tires online and have them conveniently shipped to RCT at no addtional charge. They are listed on Tire Rack, Discount Tire and various other tire web sites as recommended installers.
New Store Hours
Monday - Friday: 8am-5pm
Saturday: 8am-4pm
Social Networks
- Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/RCT-Performance/141077802696621)
- Instagram (rctperformance)
Wheel Alignment
As RCT shifted their focus over the years, a new page concentrating on wheels was created, showcasing new equipment.
The production of energy, a critical resource for the welfare and prosperity of society, is a complex process that may also cause adverse environmental and societal effects.
As of this weekend, Dummies.com is fully mobile optimized for iPhone and Android devices. In general, creating a mobile site is pretty easy. Pages have simpler layouts and there are less browsers to worry about, but the challenge in this case was hooking up the mobile templates with a site that already existed. Here are the technical highlights of this project:
Sharing Content
The mobile site is setup so that editorial staff never need to logon to edit both sites. Whatever is done to the desktop site will reflect on the mobile. The structure of the sections are reading from the same source, but applying different layouts/CSS.
Regions
The store part of the site is globalized to display the relevant currency while shopping. The site now does 2 checks to the user: 1) whether they are mobile or desktop… 2) what region of the world they are in.
Slideshow
More time was spent on this article type than all of the others combined! This was a new type that went up on the desktop site earlier this year. Translating it to mobile line for line didn't work at all. It was important to get some sort of touch and drag functionality into it, but that's not fully supported via HTML/JS yet. The closest is a plugin called iScroll, which overrides the native scroll with its own. Check out the Pilates series for an example.
Video
Previous work on Dummies.com allowed video content to be played back on iOS, which doesn't support Flash. Going mobile added another layer on top of this. Now there's a check for mobile device that serves up a smaller player. So…
- If you're using a computer or Android tablet, you get the Flash player at full size
- If you're using an iPad, you get an HTML5 player at full size
- If you're using an iPhone, you get a mini HTML5 player
- If you're using an Android phone, you get a mini Flash player
Not all e-book formats are as straight forward as Kindle or iBooks. One of the more difficult ones to deal with is Adobe E-books (.ACSM) because it's a protected format. Purchasing the e-book and getting it on your PC is the easy part. It can get complex when you try to transfer the purchase to your e-reader or tablet. In an attempt to reduce customer service calls, a new, detailed help page was created with step-by-step instructions for all of the top devices. Check it out at... www.wiley.com/go/help/ebook
The scope of WIREs Water is at the interfaces between five very different intellectual themes: the basic science of water, its physics and chemistry, flux, and things that it transfers and transforms; life in water, and the dependence of ecosystems and organisms on water to survive and to thrive; the engineering of water to furnish services and to protect society; the people who live with, experience and manage the water environment; and those interpretations that we, as a society, have brought to water through art, religion, history and which in turn shapes how we come to understand it. These interfaces are not simply designed to be ways of looking at water through what necessarily must be interdisciplinary perspectives. They are also designed to be outward facing in terms of how water can help to understand wider questions concerning our environment and human-environment interactions.
Coming in 2014:
http://wires.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-811578.html
PfeifferCustom, a service selling custom training material went up about a year and a half ago. Just last Friday, it had its first redesign. Previously, the homepage was a splash advertisement. The new one is more functional and provides a lot of "help" instruction based on experience over the past year. With the growing list of franchises, a more complete top navigation was also created. Now, the user can get to any franchise from any page. The old site had "about" links in the topnav.
The Dummies author widget was recently redone and went up this Monday. The old version was a very static one where the book was overlaid on a GIF image. This worked up to a certain point because it required the book to be a certain height. The newer portable guides had a taller aspect ratio that would break the widget. So I based the new widget on the Wiley one that went up a couple of weeks ago. The widget now stretches with the height of the book cover, making it compatible with all Dummies guides.
One of the things that went up in last weekend's build was a new tool that generates widgets like this for authors to use. With it, they could simply enter an ISBN and the little app will generate the code for use on their personal sites and blogs.
It has a clean neutral look so it will fit in well with any page design. It was coded to have a flexible vertical dimension. So it accommodates the wide variety of aspect ratios across all brands and series. Clicking any part of the widget will take user to Wiley.com's multi-retailer page where they'll have several options to buy the advertised book.
Any website that had device detection + redirection created over a year ago will now run into the issue of sending Android tablet users to the mobile version. Detection scripts usually look at the user-agent for the device type, which isn't a problem for Apple because they distinguish "iPhone" from "iPad" for iOS. Android only has a device type of "Android" since they had all phones back then. Even the early tablets were really just phones with larger screens as they shared the same exact OS (2.x) as their smaller siblings. Over the past year Android evolved into a dual device operating system and several manufacturers released popular tablet models. Their device type was still "Android" in the user-agent for everything rather than moving to "Android Phone" and "Android Tablet." Fortunately, they started distinguishing tablet from phone in 3.1. The browser portion of the string has "Safari" for tablets and "Mobile Safari" for phones. So an Android device should get sent to the mobile site if "Android" + "Mobile" are both found in the full string. "Mobile" can't be used as a catch-all term because that word in Apple lingo refers to phones and tablets. Both the iPhone and iPad use "Mobile" in their user-agent strings.
Of course, all of this may change soon as pixel density continues to increase in newer screens and manufacturers release devices that fill in all sizes between 4" phones and 10" tablets!
Here's the address of the new AARP Bookstore by Wiley:
bookstore.aarp.org
So far, we have travel, health, cooking, money and technology e-books available as well as FREE content.
Previously, Kimengyeo.com was taking a feed for products the artist was selling in her Online Etsy store, SketchyCards. All items used to have the same template and introductory paragraph, so I had ColdFusion strip it out so it wouldn't look repetitive on the page that was parsing the RSS. Just recently, Kim added some new products that no longer followed the template. So the truncation and processing has been removed. Check out new products for sale on SketchyCards by Kim Eng Yeo.
Additionally, the homepage has also been updated with 2012 events.
We had another Saturday morning deployment today, though not as early as the usual 6am. Here are some of the highlights:
WIREs: Another new journal went up for WIREs... Developmental biology is concerned with the fundamental question of how a single cell, the fertilized egg, ultimately produces a complex, fully patterned adult organism. Click here to visit WIREs.
AARP Bookstore: In partnership with AARP, we'll be selling a bunch of our books with special branding through this co-branded bookstore. The site components went up with this build, but the URL has not yet been publicized. I'll provide it in a future post once it goes public.
All Sites: All sites in our system will now have links to buy books from Foyles, MPH, Kinokuniya, Sony and WH Smith if they are detected as being available.
