Cool Depot's website needed to be responsive, but it didn't require an edgy design. So I used Bootstrap to get it up and running quickly. I setup a small helper PHP file to store the head and footer of each page. I know it won't scale for a larger site, but it will be easy to replace if the site does start to grow. My last update to it added PayPal integration.
I've been a part of the LifeSize website since August 2009. They needed the new website live in October to coincide with a product launch and InfoComm 2009. It was a very busy 3 months for two of us: fleshing out the requirements, working with an agency for the initial development, and migrating the content from the old website. I spent the next two years updating and improving the site without the agency.
In August 2012 we released the new www.lifesize.com. It used the same content management system, Sitecore, but we installed it on new servers, new databases, and with a completely different information architecture. It took our team of 3 and our excellent Sitecore agency, CodeHouse, 6 months of planning and development. We spent the next year attacking all the important stuff we had to put off - SEO improvements, UI tweaks, and automation.
I've rewritten this website about six times over the years. This latest version implements a design by Chris MacPherson, and maintains the logo designed by Daniella Floeter. This page is just static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on a web server. The blog runs on WordPress. I spent some hours experimenting with CodeIgniter for this site, but with only one page I decided against it.
I wanted to upload a bunch of images and descriptions into a chronological stream for a special project. I found Jorge Epuñan's "Timelinr" to get me half way there. I modified his code to handle descriptions and then wrote an admin console in Node. This project is what prompted my picking a server-side language blog post. I posted the source on my GitHub account.
I wrote Have Done Task Timer to help me track my time against specific tasks in the face of periodic interruptions and task switching during the work day. I just needed a simple program where I could easily track time on multiple tasks, save it to disk, and delete the tasks whenever I actually logged the time into JIRA. This was my first C# application so be gentle with the source code.
We launched complete reskin of the LifeSize website in February of 2013. It still ran Sitecore on the same servers with the same data architecture, but almost all of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was brand new (including a lot of content). Both the designs and the code came from agencies, and so I spent a lot of time reviewing code and QAing the new behaviors. This meant supporting two big scary merges just for the new designs and another two to make it responsive.
Three of us turned this thing around in less than 24 hours. It was my first time to use Python; it is as easy to pick up as people say. Had some trouble figuring out Django's flavor of MVC, but I assume it would have been easier on a full night's sleep. In hindsight we should not have spent so much time getting the svg generation code working since the hackathon was about design excellence and not matplotlib excellence. We came in last of four teams, but I learned a lot in a very short time span and met some smart people. Worth it.
We launched complete redesign with a new brand and new content in May 2014. We worked with ISITE/ConnectiveDX for a lot of development and design.
I wrote a Chrome extension to help log time in JIRA and to replace my Task Tracker from 2011. The source is on GitHub.
In 2015 we began a progressive redesign of the site again with new brand and new content which would continue through 2016. We closely integrated our Sitecore partner, Engagency, into our development process and hired Noble Studios for initial designs. Over the same time span we grew our internal team to handle even more design and development in house. In December 2016 became independent again and that occasioned a new logo and we got our old name back without the "a division of Logitech".
I plan to release this publicly by Fall 2016. It's the Spring 2016 semester project for my Verification and Validation class from Dr. Khurshid.