Monzilla Media recently redesigned the portfolio and gallery site of professional graphics guru EightyEightTeeth.

Thane Champie (aka 88teeth) recently hired Monzilla Media to redesign his professional portfolio and gallery site, EightyEightTeeth.com. The site has been online since July of 2004 and has featured a large number of gallery pieces via numerous design incarnations. For the redesign, Mr. Champie wanted to emphasize his growing portfolio of graphic design, artwork, and photographic creations, while focusing on his in-depth technical articles and blog posts. Previous versions of the EightyEightTeeth site were statically designed in HTML, which made updating content a chore and content management extremely labor-intensive. Thus, for the new design, Mr. Champie wanted to implement a dynamic content management system, or CMS. After some investigation, WordPress was chosen as the perfect solution.

The site structure for EightyEightTeeth.com is designed to facilitate long-term content management and site maintenance. The core features of the site include category-specific randomized image display in the header, customized post loop architecture, and alternate category & archive views for gallery excerpts. Each of the “Artwork” and “Photography” categories features current thumbnail galleries linking directly to their respective posts. Random header graphics are linked to custom-fit, dynamic “pop-up” images, while also providing a title-based caption link to their associated single-view gallery posts. Further, the site employs WordPress’ custom-field and excerpt functionality to provide complete control over the structural organization of the site.

The visual design of the site keeps the emphasis on Mr. Champie’s visual and written work, while fostering a sense of creativity, originality, and professionalism. Throughout the design, optimized alpha-transparent PNG images are employed to achieve a variety of complex yet subtle visual effects — semi-translucent overlays, multiplied drop shadows, and interactive background images all contribute to the site’s overall post-modern, organic aesthetic. Additionally, uniform fonts, strongly contrasted colors, and complementary styles greatly enhance the readability and usability of the site, which itself is optimized for superior performance and uniform presentation in all modern browsing devices.

Overall, the new EightyEightTeeth site serves as an excellent example of the beautiful, fully functional creations made possible using the principles of standards-based web design: progressive enhancement, unobtrusive scripting, graceful degradation, and clean separation of markup, presentation, and behavior.

Here is a summary of the main services provided by Monzilla Media for the EightyEightTeeth website:

• Dynamic theme design, development, and testing
• Site security measures and search-engine optimization
• Extensive attention to detail, including clean source-code output
• Implementation of Web Standards using PHP, XHTML, and CSS
• Implementation of degradable, unobtrusive JavaScript
• Configuration of essential site feeds and sitemap
• Custom graphic design for site imagery
• Performance optimization measures
• Cross-browser compatibility testing
• ..and much, much more!

Check it out at EightyEightTeeth.com.