The Boudinot Agency website was the primary force behind Vision Forum’s alternate-reality Jamestown 400 Treasure Hunt. By interacting through the site with the main character of the story, Jack Bradford, players of the game progressed through a series of time-released clues and events. The first one hundred players to solve the final clue were inducted into the Order of Jamestown, sent special rewards, and invited to travel to Jamestown for the last phase of the hunt and a chance to find four hundred gold coins.

Since, in its fictional world, the agency is “a small security and preservation firm that also specializes in document analysis, historical research, and investigation” my first thought was to give the site a high-tech spy theme.

While the structure was approved, Vision Forum preferred that the agency have a Colonial look.

The entire site was designed and implemented within two weeks to meet a very strict deadline. Since this was a contest, the question and answer system needed to be rock solid. Along with the clues themselves, files and messages were also delivered on a clue-by-clue basis.

The answers to the clues came in various forms including names, dates, locations, and phrases. Valid answers could be written in various formats, so custom regular expressions were needed for each and every clue. If the answer was “July 4, 1776” for example, each of the following answers would be equally valid:

• Jul. 4, 1776
• 7-4-1776
• 07/04/1776
• 4 July 1776
• The 4th day of the 7th month in the year of our Lord 1776
• 1776-07-04, ad nauseam

While the following would be invalid:

• Jan. 4, 1776
• 4-7-1776
• agerygaetgargaerbgaeaglalaebe
• 999999999999
• Our Nation’s Birthday!!!, etc.

But I do love a challenge. Each clue, complete with regular expression, formatted text, and associated files took an average of one hour to complete. It was quite the ride.

Alan Daily needed a logo and a website with as much attention to quality craftsmanship as he brings to his own trade. The needs were simple: One-page featuring a SlideShowPro gallery that allows Alan to personally maintain his portfolio, a business card, and magnetic signs for the sides of his truck.

Vision Forum’s idea was as simple as it was ambitious: Create the best Christian multimedia download store to-date. A custom PHP framework, content management system, flash-based text replacement, nifty-little preview player, and fourteen months later, three very caffeinated developers saw the big guy march on the scene.

New Venture Lab wanted a brand and a template for their site that would match the quality of the content they provide. The initial thought was to experiment with a scientific theme, but they quickly decided it made them look too much like the wrong kind of lab. Opting for a heraldry theme, red was chosen for strength, gold for generosity, and a bend for defense.

Even a good logo can be a bad logo if it fails to communicate the proper message. New Venture Lab wanted to experiment with a scientific theme, but decided a logo like this made them look too much like the wrong kind of lab.

Three friends in San Antonio have big dreams. They also have a logo, website, business cards, and full-time jobs… Good thing the graphics also make great wallpaper. The thought was that each section of the site would display the various stages of designing, building, and launching a rocket.

In commemoration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, Josh and Sarah Wean edited and updated this classic novel by Mary Johnston. This tale of love and adventure in the New World needed a look and feel as high-spirited as the story itself.

Imagine being one of ten family members in two cars on a million-mile journey across North America. Imagine writing your memoirs. Imagine being asked to design the reprint of those memoirs, inside and out, complete with original doodles.

Daring to be grey in a universe of color, a film-loving group of friends in San Antonio, Texas needed a template for their dream. The original idea was to capture the look of a medieval tapestry, but eventually it blended its way into something a little more retro.

Four years after my original design and implementation of the Vision Forum Ministries website, it was beginning to show it’s age. With the increasing scope and varied amount of content, they were in dire need of a content management system and a design that would allow for indefinite expansion.

I was asked to come up with a way to base the content management system on Movable Type while still using ASP.NET at the core for the heavy lifting. It was decided that MT would publish static XML files and that we’d use ASP.NET to format the data using XSLT.

Desiring the URLs to be human readable, I came up with a way to mimic a part of the functionality of Apache’s mod_rewrite to force all traffic through the root default.aspx file. The URL was then parsed and the correct XML file was dynamically loaded.

The problem then was how to include ASP.NET functionality into a portion of the output being generated by the XSLT. That was solved by including a custom <include> tag which ASP.NET would then parse and replace with the proper control.