Admaris.com - Daniel Servranckx, Web Developer and Programmer.

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...Show you some of my work

The following illustrates in more details the kind of services I offer.

Web sites built from Open Source designs

In all the projects listed under this heading, I created a single mock-up page using an original Open Source design. I then added custom features like dynamic navigation, tailored menus, colours, styles and scripts, and modified or re-wrote the xhtml code to present an identical look and feel on all popular browsers.

Once the client was happy with the mock-up page, I turned it into a Dreamweaver template to quickly create individual Web pages.

The sites are listed in order of increased complexity:

Synergy Virtual Book Tour — mdbenoit.com/synergy

Author M.D. Benoît was using a novel approach to promote her new book, Synergy: a Virtual Book Tour. She wanted a bold design to support the background mood of her story.

She picked the open source Extreme Heat as her base design, from which I created a single main page (shown here) and a different looking template which the author used to create the individual Web pages.

Total effort: approximately 2 hours.

Zumaya Otherworlds — zumayapublications/otherworlds

Zumaya Publications was launching a new Web site for its Fantasy/ Science Fiction line and wanted a new design to match.

The publisher picked the open source Intersection as her base design. I fixed some cross browsers common look differences, added JavaScripts for roll-over effects and image pre-loading, and created a single template which someone else uses to create the individual Web pages.

Total effort: approximately 3 hours.

Shark World 2007 — www.nsc.ca/shark

As the main Shark World 2007 site is unilingual German, The Nepean Sailing Club (NSC) participants asked me for small site that would offer some translation of the important pages.

I created a new sub Web to the main Web by modifying the Summer Days design, changing the navigation, header image and the colour palette to fit the NSC main theme, and fixing a few "bugs" in the CSS to make the site look identical on all browsers.

I later recycled the template to create the permanent OYSTR (Ottawa Youth Sail Training Regatta) Sub-web for the Nepean Sailing Club. This site is now maintained by a Club's volunteer.

Total design and development efforts: approximately 4 hours for the Shark Worlds, and 7 hours for the OYSTR (as the Registration form is quite dynamic).

This site — admaris.com

Admaris Inc. needed a Web site that would exemplifies what it offers.

I modified the I See New People design using a stock.xchng picture in the header. I added scripts and dynamic effects to the navigation menu, and more heading levels.

Total effort (excluding text composition): approximately 5 hours.

The effort to compose and write the content was about 20 hours.

Author Janine Cross — janinecross.ca

Author J. Cross approach me to build a Web site around her Dragon Temple Saga trilogy. She picked the open source All the Reds as her base design, which I modified to fit a book style format, tweaking some of the colours to match that of her books. I then created 8 new pages using the template and the author's text and pictures.

This project was my first attempt at using an Open Source design, and it won me over right then and there!

Total effort: approximately 7 hours.

I also configured the author's FTP server and email domain, and still maintain the site on an as-needed basis.

Daniel Servranckx — servranckx.admaris.com

For my personal Web site, I extensively modified and expanded the Wide Open design, changing all the colours, fonts, page layout, and navigation view. In fact, I changed everything but the basic architecture. I then migrated the old Web pages to the new design.

This is a good example of how radically different a re-worked design can look from the original, and how, by a judicious choice of colours, a clear foreground over a dark background can be pleasing without the typical glare and eye-sore associated with such a colour scheme.

This site uses what is called a liquid design, i.e. one where the page always expands to maximum browser width.

Total effort to create the template and migrate the site: approximately 15 hours.

Author M.D. Benoit — mdbenoit.com

M.D. Benoit writes speculative fictions for a living. She wanted a look to match the mood of her stories.

She selected the Midnight RainForest design which I modified with new navigation, links and special interest features, and used a stock.xchng photo in the header and right sidebar. This is another example of a liquid design.

From this design, I created a Dreamweaver template which I used to rebuilt a few sample pages from the original Web site, and showed the author how to use Dreamweaver to do the same with the rest of the site.

Total effort:

• on my part: approximately 10 hours.
• on the client's part: another 20 hours.

The author uses my services from time to time to solve formatting, coding and styling problems.

Ottawa Special Olympics — ottawaspecialolympics.org

The Ottawa District Board of Director wanted to change their Web site from a home-grown to an integrated, easy to maintain site while keeping all the functionality of the original.

I used the services of Sierra-Dawn Web Creations to reformat the graphic of the Special Olympics Canada Web site and blend the Ottawa specific logo in the image. Then, using the colour theme of the header image, I re-formatted and re-styled the Multifex-2 design selected by the OSO Webmaster, added new navigation and links, and implemented JavaScript for rollover effects and non-spam email address generation.

I then rebuilt the whole site page by page from partial html files supplied by the Webmaster.

Total effort: approximately 20 hours.

The Webmaster also used my services to solve formatting, coding and styling problems.

Web sites built/ rebuilt from Original Template

Here is some of my original work:

Jack Meter Case Files — mdbenoit.com/jackmeter

Author M.D. Benoît is writing her 4th Jack Meter Case Files book, and needs a separate Web site to present this series.

She initially picked a free design on the Internet. However, this template was built using an out-of-date layout-table design, which proved to be too rigid and needlessly complex to be readily adaptable to her needs.

I therefore created a new modern design from scratch using the general look of her initial selection as a guide, which I turned over to her as a ready-to-use Dreamweaver template.

Total design and development efforts: approximately 7 hours - most of which was spent making the design cross-browser compatible (the curse of any web designer)!

Dr. Anna Drzewiecki — doctor-anna.com

Sierra-Dawn Web Creations asked me to help with the creation of the structure and theme of an original one-page template based on the theme of Dr. Drzewiecki's business card.

This design contains some dynamic features such as an expending drop down sub-menus.

Total time to create the design with functional menus and navigation: approximately 7 hours.

As you can see, designing a single Web page from scratch, even a simple one, takes as much time as using it to create a whole site!

Rivière du soleil — soleil.htm

As an alternative to the existing table-based design by Sierra-Dawn Web Creations, I completely revamped the internal structure using modern CSS/layer-based techniques.

Note the drop down menu structure derived from an open source Tigra Drop Down Menu, which I customized, scaled and positioned in the design.

Total time to structure and re-design the template, and add functional menus and navigation: approximately 3 hours.

Web site Support

I fine-tuned or enhanced the functionality of other designer's templates:

Jay's Chalet — jayschalet.com

I modified the design by Sierra-Dawn Web Creations, itself derived from an OSWD design, to give it the same look and feel in all modern browsers.

I also created the dynamic javaScript-based mouse over image viewer in the Chalet Photos page.

Total time to modify the design and create the photo viewer: approximately 2 hours.

I also offer programming and support services such as Web development, server-side programming, site maintenance and administration:

Ohm Networks — www.ohmnetworks.com

A short but difficult code migration project

Ohm Networks Web site was re-designed by a junior Web designer in late 2006. The Career page, written in PHP / MySQL, had not been migrated because the designer had moved on to other projects. The original code was written entirely in PHP by a seasoned programmer, with all the HTML code dynamically generated on the server by various PHP scripts following a logic flow based on parameters extracted from a MySQL database. If by now you are totally confused, don't worry, so was I!

As there were no design notes and only a few in-code comments, my first task was to study the structure and organization of this large site (over 1300 files and 350 folders), trace the processing flow from the bottom up, and document the multi-steps PHP/ MySQL sequence of events leading to the construction of the career page as seen on the browser.

Once I understood what was going on "under the hood", I used the new site Dreamweaver template and original old PHP code fragments to create a new dynamic html page (show above) with embedded PHP/ MySQL code.

While doing the above, I also fixed problems with the Dreamweaver template and html/ CSS code for cross-browsers compatibility, and added a User Login function to the ohmnetworks main page.

Total time charged the client: 11 hours, 9 of which to familiarize myself with the client's Web site organization and code, and document the complex server-side page building process.

A tricky server migration project

In February 2008, the client asked to have his web site migrated from a home based WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server to a managed ISP based LAMP (Linux) server.

I guided him through the registration process, configured the new site, moved all the files, exported the databases from the old server, imported them into the new server, modified the PHP code to handle server variables under PHP 5, and modified the MySQL user validation code to handle a different password encryption algorithm under MySQL 5.

Total time charged the client: 11 hours, 5 of which to track and fix differences in PHP and MySQL versions.

The Nepean Sailing Club — www.nsc.ca

This is a large and complex site with thousands of files, hundreds of Web pages, scripts, dynamic functions, on-line databases, server side scripts, etc. The site grows by about 700 pages/ year.

In 2000, I converted the site from a loose collection of Web pages to HTML V3.2 compliant standards.

In 2003, using the services of a graphic artist, I completely re-designed and rebuilt the Web site structure and backbone to it's current HTML V4.01 / CSS Level 2 standards that present a common look and feel on all major Web Browsers. Two different style sheets were used for IE and non-IE browsers.

In early 2006, I re-designed the pages backbone using modern coding and styling techniques, converting a table-based layout into a table-less, Cascading Style Sheet Positioning (CSS-P) layout.

In late 2006, with the coming of MSIE7, I combined the two "browser-dependent" Style Sheets developed in previous years into a single IE ready, "browser-independent" set.

In late 2007, I started converting the site from an Microsoft's ASP/ Coldfusion/ MSSQL environment to a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment. The full migration took effect on 21 March 2008. This effort alone required about 70 hours of work as databases had to be converted and imported from Microsoft's SQL to MySQL environment, many scripts had to be re-written from asp and Coldfusion to php, a new access to the member's private area had to be devised and implemented, and hundreds of broken links caused by file names upper and lower case mismatch (Microsoft being case insensitive but not Linux) had to be tracked and fixed.

Some of the unique features I implemented over the years are:

• sub-Webs for food services, sail training, provincial, national and international regattas;
• interactive on-line reservation, registration and volunteer's sign-in systems;
• fees and other dynamic calculators and complex form pre-processors and validators;
• members' private login areas;
• extraction and display of database-stored Members' private information; and
• a "poor man's" portable site management tool that permits a site-wide build of Web pages from simple text files.

I spend around 30 hours per month maintaining and updating the site.

Enterprise Sites

As a contract professional web developer and programmer, I also developed Enterprise size Web projects.

The scope and level of work of such projects is far beyond the needs of a small business, and I present this section only as a further demonstration of my knowledge and expertise.

Government Site — DND/ CF Support Web Portal

Myself and a junior webmaster developed an information Web Portal (hosted on a private network) for the Department of National Defence/ Canadian Forces. The Portal was built, maintain and expanded over a 31 months period. The portal serves documents and incidents from a large SQL database containing hundreds of tables and thousands of records.

Contrary to the other projects presented in this page, this portal used the server-side Microsoft .NET framework (ASP and ADO) -which provides a large body of pre-coded solutions to common program requirements, and manages the execution of programs written specifically for the framework.