Mike Meisner

In case you have been wishing and looking for a way to nicely flip and slide objects to reveal content using jQuery, here are two options. The first lets you flip an object up, down, left and right and it can contain HTML content as well. I can think of several cool things to do with this; an “e business card” or as a link to some small amount of html such as pricing or services, availability, etc.

Visit Flip – A jQuery Plugin

The second option is a little different. It animates a hover and slides the top portion off to reveal some HTML below. Take a look. Again, I can think of multiple uses for these excellent plugins.

Visit Animate a Hover with jQuery

Here’s a quick and dirty breakdown of services I provide.

Many premium themes feature cool featured content sliding areas, where the latest posts appear. There is one such plugin, built around the Mootools library, but I wanted to use jQuery, as I prefer it over the other libraries. I also wanted it to automatically scroll. Of course, this can easily be modified to use the navigation buttons as well.

To begin, you will need a few things:

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Why do you need online marketing?

Having a website is only the first piece of a much larger online marketing mosaic. It’s like having a great product sitting on a shelf – it’s useless if no one knows enough about it to buy it. I know how to get your site traffic.

Get your new or existing website seen & heard with effective online marketing & promotion tactics, including Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, Email Marketing, and Link Building with my help. The ROI seen on many online marketing techniques is usually so good that it pays for itself and then some, and what’s more, you don’t have to hassle with the organizing, administrating and maintaining of the various programs – I do. All you have to deal with is results and profits.

When you work with me we will create a detailed marketing approach for the website and create the most effective campaign possible.

My online marketing services include:

* Pay Per Click advertising with Google, Yahoo and MSN
* External link building programs
* Online Advertising design & creation – banner ads and flash ads
* Sponsored blogging
* Online advertising – banners, advertisements
* Design & creation of unique landing pages for PPC, email, viral or one-off campaigns
Affiliate marketing set up

When someone queries a search engine for a keyword related to your company’s products or services does your page appear in the top ten matches, or does your competitor’s? If your website is listed but not within the first two or three pages of results you’re losing out on a potential customer—no matter how many search engines you submitted your site to.

Email Campaigns

Email Marketing campaigns are a proven and highly effective marketing tool that can be used by any-sized business, at any stage in their marketing cycle, and with great results. They are cheap to start up and offer a large return on investment; it’s also completely trackable – meaning you can see where every hard-earned penny went and better target your audience.

Offers range from tailored email marketing services to SMBs, ranging from single newsletter or campaign design & creation to full-scale email marketing programs that see you delivering your monthly content and letting me do the rest.

Regardless of what stage you’re at in your SMB marketing lifecycle, email marketing can and should be used in some capacity. If you’re just starting out and don’t yet have an email list, no problem: I can add a list-building/newsletter subscription form to your website to start collecting and building relationships with your customers. If you already have a list, then we can build off that existing platform.

Most websites require periodic updating; some more frequently than others. Updates may be as simple as a change in an email address or may involve a complete rework of the website.

Good organization and simplicity are keys to a website that is easy to maintain and that can expand to meet your expanding needs. For those website owners who have the time and moderate technical skills I will design the site so that it may be maintained by the owner or his/her aid. I can even design custom software to help owners maintain their own sites. However, many website owners will choose to have updates made for them. My low rates and fast response time make this a viable option for nearly everyone.

If you already have a website we can maintain and manage that site for you. I handle everything from updates and domain name registration renewal to search engine submission.

I am a big fan of WordPress, the world’s most popular Content Management System (CMS). It’s easy to use and can handle everything a site needs, large and small. If you currently have a static website and are looking to put a Content Management System behind it, give us a call and we’ll give you a free quote. Any site can benefit from a CMS backbone, as it makes updating and maintaining much easier. Just look at the text editor screenshot. If you’re familiar with Word or any text editor, you will be all good.

SEO Friendly

Right out of the box, Wordpress comes ready to reign in the search engines with it’s powerful “All in One SEO” plugin which performs fantastically. I integrate it with Google Analytics, and other tools and strategies to give you a complete overview of you site’s performance and usage.

Blog Management

Wordpress is by nature a blogging tool; as the most popular one it has a huge support network and can easily be customized. If your website includes Articles, Press Releases, and Updates of any nature, our CMS will allow you to easily manage everything. I include all sorts of social networking goodies, RSS feeds, and more, so your blog gets maximum exposure.

Ecommerce

I can integrate most popular merchants with an easy to manage shopping cart on your blog or website. If you want to sell a few items or a warehouse full, there’s a solution.

For starters, a visually appealing design always sets the stage. I’m passionate about my craft, and create unique, original site designs that will grab the visitor’s attention and make sure they hang around long enough to really take in what you have to offer them. Look at some of my designs in the portfolio, or read on to find out more about what we have to offer.

Designing by web standards

I take pride in designing attractive websites by W3C compliant standards. Designing by these standards ensure cross-browser compatibility, keeps code clean, and makes sure that the site design is forward and backward compatible with web browsers. We check compatibility with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

Making your message clear

I understands how critical the first five seconds of a user’s visit to your site truly is. Users don’t want to have to try too hard to find the information, service, or product they were looking for. That first five seconds may very well be all you ever see of that potential customer if the website doesn’t reflect what they were hoping to find.

Simple design, simple navigation

Web design should be simple, elegant and innovative. I prioritize the end-user experience first, and understand that the last thing anybody wants is to be confused by site navigation that doesn’t follow typical logic one expects when they get to a website.

Appealing to your client base

Before starting on your design, we do our research to make sure that the website strikes the right chord with you and your intended audience. I often recommend clients download the project questionnaire before starting.

Since I’ve started using Wordpress as my choice platform for web development, I’ve been “modularizing” my development system. What does this mean? In the past, I would haphazardly make a half-cocked plan of action and get to work immediately.

Now I load the chamber with strategic bullets that allow me to get going…faster.

Frameworks and Modules

Modularize your CSS by using a framework (I like Blueprint), a reset.css, and make a general CSS file where you keep commonly used snippets. I often found myself referencing code from a site I built because I remember a technique I used there. Now I have a “cssmodules.css” file that holds neatly commented snippets to style bullets, link, comments and much more.

Keep the best, ditch the rest

Download and keep the best plugins and scripts; the ones you use the most. I suggest “Ultimate Google Analytics”, “Google XML Sitemap Generator”, “All in one SEO Pack”, “Sociable”, and any others that you use and find yourself returning to their webpage to download again. I also suggest doing the same for javascripts, fla. files, etc. Anything you use a lot.

All graphics are not icons

Modularize popular files and their types. All graphics are not the same type. For instance, keep all icons in a folder called “Icons” and all textures in a folder called “textures”; all patterns in a folder called patterns. I have an entire folder of “working .PSDs”. You get it.

Smart CSS

Take a moment to define the color classes in your CSS file, somewhere near the top. Chances are you will be using these for a lot of things – rollover colors, borders, fonts, etc. Not all of us can remember the hex code for light blue after all. It’s much easier to remember a class name of “ltblue” however.

Use Subversion

Just do it. I don’t but I should (and will). It would really save a lot of time and frustration.

That’s all I can think of for now. Do you have any tips you want to share about how to streamline your development process?

I find jQuery to be the best javascript toolbox out there, and will focus on galleries built around that framework, however some listed do not rely on jQuery.

Gallerific

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Step Carousel Viewer

From the folks at Dynamic Drive comes this slick carousel viewer.
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jQGalScroll – A scrolling image gallery

Simple and clean gallery where the images scroll using the Scroll.to function.
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Space Gallery

A flash-like effect done very well. The images line up behind each other and “pop and fade” as you click them.
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Script & Style automatically generate photo gallery from list of images

This is a robust script put out by the folks over at script and style, and the best feature is that you don’t have to manually resize photos. Just drag and drop into a folder, and presto. You’re good to go. Works well with larger galleries. Uses the fancybox technique to overlay the image.
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Image Flow

Another flash-like effect here. Featuring a scrollbar at the bottom, and a 3d, circular panorama of the photos, each pictures “flows” into the center spot as they seemingly dance in a circular pattern.
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Dynamic Image Gallery and Slideshow

This one has it all – javascript, thumbnails, AJAX, and more. It’s presented in a clean format with the thumbnails scrolling along the bottom, and the featured image above.
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