dearride.com
Unique hand crafted surf boards
Currently based in Los Angeles, Iacopo is a Greek - Italian self-proclaimed surf addict and designer who has fused his two passions in his work/brand, Dear Ride.
Having envisioned the brand from his love of the sea and design, he followed his desire to create a design aesthetic that genuinely reflected the spirit and style of today’s surf culture.
Iacopo holds a degree in Marine Composites Technology from the University of Plymouth in the UK and a Master of Arts in Product Design from Domus Academy in Italy.
DearRide Style Boards are hand crafted in Greece using unique and carefully selected natural materials.
Being contracted by designpark.gr for the development of this website gave me the opportunity to begin working on an idea I had in mind. The idea was to create a light, minimal wordpress theme ideally suited for the quick and easy creation of single page websites.
In it's original version, the template uses the Advanced Custom Fields plugin functionality and mentality to set up the various reusable available block element types, in a repeater style fashion.
There are block types for video, single image, image gallery, image slider and text, as well as several configuration options allocated to each of these. The single image and image slider display the images as a background to the block and have configuration options that govern the text styles, menu link id's, as well as background image properties. For the latter for instance, you can choose between fixed and relative, the 'fixed' option rendering a parallax style output.
VisitKythera.com
The leading tourist portal for Kythera
Visitkythera.com is the go-to location for information related to visiting the mythical Kythera island.
It boasts of a impressive collection of resources for the island's visitors translated into 7 languages. It offers information on a seemingly exhaustive list of things to see in Kythera: Museums, monuments, churches and monasteries, villages, beaches, caves, etc. And naturally, it also showcases the island's businesses in accommodation, food and drink, vehicle rental and the like.
The visikythera website has a long history. It's predecessor was visitkythera.gr which was founded more than 10 years ago. Joining the kappagram team a couple of months before the launch of the new site, we have worked on a wide variety of objectives since.
These range from the various styling / templating tasks, to the more advanced work on functionality for the search filter, reviews, localization, administrative revisions, and various plugin integrations.
The highlight integration for this project was the development of a plugin to allow the owners of the listings to translate their content from the front-end into the sites' 7 languages.
Visitkythera.com uses the qtranslate-x plugin for translating content. At the same time, it allows owner listings access to the front-end only. The qtranslate-x plugin however was designed to allow translations to be added only in the worpdress backend as the lead developer John Clause confirms here .
The qtranslate (and qtranslate-x) plugin has a unique way of handling traslations. It stores all translations in one string (and consequently in one database entry), separating them with it's special markup language. Then in the frontend, it 'serves' only the relevant language part and hides the rest.
The Front-end qTranslate plugin creates a (temporary) copy of each field for each language in the frontend edit form, and actually hides the original one. After the user fills them out and submits the form, the plugin 're-assembles' the input into the original field in the qtranslate format using javascript (and jQuery).
Bookoo.gr
An innovative DIY publishing platform
Bookoo.gr has been meticulously designed and produced by designpark.gr.
It features an interactive tool that simplifies and leads you through the necessary steps towards self-publishing your book. It helps you select dimensions, color, paper types etc, design / upload a cover and optionally sell your ebook version online, among other things.
Furthermore, bookoo.gr offers various related services along the way, from copyediting, proofreading, book cover design and illustration by selected experts, to ISBN registration, DRM integration (not my cup of tea but hey) and more.
Bookoo.gr is backed by the leading publishing company in Greece, Psichogios Publications.
Joining the team's efforts several months before the official launch, we've worked on pretty much the entire codebase since (Laravel). Below is a just a brief, and rather arbitrary, selection of work.
Overall, we improved administrative control and code maintainability, as well as added numerous new features, continuously refactoring code in the process.
Book components (book types, paper types, color, book binding options, etc), ebook categories, services and content editing control were developed as respective manageable backend interfaces.
Major reorganization of the cart and product relationships was accompanied by an improved administrator orders interface with added features and refined UI. Product categories acquired their own distinct sections for clearer legibility and improved organization. User tickets were embedded alongside orders to facilitate and speed up support.
The interoperability between the user profile pages and the checkout process, the addition of a variety of discount coupon options, the continuous development of the interactive tool are some other examples.
Book component relations matrix
One very interesting and challenging task had been to model and develop the complex set of conditions and combinations of components that go into a printed book - and their respective effects on prices and availability.
For instance, different paper types are related to different binding options and paper colors, the different combinations of which may or may not be available within specific ranges of a-) total book pages and/or b-) total book copies. The choices / changes made by the user in real time to their selection of these respective components have to reflect the changes in price as well as future selection availability of other component combinations.
These rules had to modeled and converted into a manageable system so that a specific change in market forces tomorrow (ex x paper is no longer available for under y total pages) could be easily incorporated into the system by a site administrator.
Impact Hub Zurich
Prototyping the Future of Business
The Impact Hub is a high standard collaborative spaces network, with Impact Hub member spaces located in more than 90 countries worldwide. In 2015, the Panter operated co-working space Colab Zurich joined forces with the Zurich Impact Hub and a new website was commissioned.
The work consisted of a psd to html design, and then onto it's final form as a custom wordpress theme. A good deal of custom functionality was also required.
Most of this centered around a variety of custom post types, for community members, funding programs, jobs, events, locations (buildings) and spaces (rooms) with their respective custom fields and page designs. Ajax filtering of custom post results was also frequently used across the spectrum.
Daniel coordinated and mentored the work as project manager and Stefanos helped with the project as well. There were also discussions both on and off topic with a variety of Panter members in the process.
It was an enriching experience to have been able to work and interact with the highly talented group of people that make up the Panter organization. There is nothing better for personal development than interacting with the best.
GotGetNotary.com
A leading US notary directory
GotGetNotary.com may primarily be thought of as a place to go to find a notary near you. But it is also a valuable place for notaries as it provides a rich collection of resources relevant to their practice.
I joined Sharon a few years back in her efforts at migrating and revamping gogetnotary with a desire to expand it's features.
My original work was centered around setting up the directory with the different subscription packages available and importing the data. We added the ability to search by location and map views as well as a redesign of the directory pages. More recently we worked on tweaking the available notary packages and fields, as well as an improved subscription handling system.
It has been a joy to work with Sharon and GoGetNotary.com. We have done quite a bit of work over the years.
Happyland!
Family amusement park in Valais, Switzerland
As of November 2017 this website has been replaced. This was an original design with a custom template and one of the last websites I built from scratch using the Joomla CMS. I was kind of sad to see it go.
It was a trilingual site that included a listing of the rides, restaurant menu, video and photo gallery, directions for car, train and bike, as well as customized detailed directions via query.
There were also multiple day weather forecasts as the park would remain closed on rainy days. Finally, google, facebook and tripadvisor reviews had been integrated.
The site was commissioned by Myjoom.com and built with love, some of which was probably invoked by the memorable image of that kid in the background.
The Essex Pass
An inspiring tale of local online business success
The essexpass is a great deal. For only £9.99 you get access to a large number of special offers in Essex for an entire year!
The business model is fairly simple. However, this business fulfills the tallest order of them all: To leave all parties involved feeling enriched.
The £9.99 cost for what is on offer is a no brainer for the consumer. And the added value created for the local businesses involved is comparable.
I started working with Jonathan a few months before for the launch in May 2014. I worked primarily on the deal directory functionality. From adding image gallery, map, reviews, nearby deals, etc, to the single-page views, working on the vcards and search pages. Some further work was done the following year as well, integrating Trip Advisor reviews as the most notable.
Jonathan is bright, kind and humble. He can micro-manage as well as he can be a visionary. This coupled with the win-win nature of the essexpass deal has led to their well-earned success. It was an inspiration to me, I am happy to have been a small part of it.
MyJoom.com
Home of GeocodeFactory, the leading Joomla! mapping solution
MyJoom.com has been offering quality extensions for the Joomla! CMS since the latter's early days. GeocodeFactory has historically been one of the most popular Joomla components, allowing one to map Joomla! content in highly customizable ways.
My first work with Cedric and MyJoom.com was actually writing the main documentation for Geocode Factory 5. Other extension documents then followed suit.
In time, I started working the ticket support system, helping with troubleshooting, installation and custom development on MyJoom.com client websites.
Our goal for the MyJoom.com website was to create a lighter custom template while keeping many styles from the previous site.