PixelCounter - Indie Front End Web Developer

During 2008 I worked for a small Surrey-based marketing agency who’s intranet was old, ugly, buggy and unreliable – some members of staff had gone as far as to revert to paper and pens simply to avoid using it. The intention of this project was to modernise it, reducing the number of headaches and problems the current intranet caused by replacing it with an all-singing, all-dancing replacement. It was also intended that the new intranet would offer all of the functionality and features that the old intranet either did not provide, or had failed – the original intranet had, after all, never been intended for the type of use that was now required from it.

Designed by a very talented in-house designer this was always going to be a very attractive (and thus hard to develop!) website, I think the screen shots below can give you a far better idea of just how great this system was destined to be.

It was my responsibility to slice the designer’s artwork and create a working static version of the site (in xHTML, CSS, and prototype.js), and then integrate it with the views layer of the CakePHP backend. With the amount of gradients, drop shadows, curves and intricate detail work, this was pleasure to work on and a challenge at the same time, particularly since at the time internet support for such things was relatively limited (the majority of the staff still using IE6).

Sadly, this was always going to be a down-time project and the plug was pulled on this project when the workload increased. Although I had chance to develop the vast majority of the front end in static form, it never progressed any further and as far as I’m aware, they continue to use their original decrepit intranet system (and pens and paper) to this day.

Below are a few screenshots of the final front end as far as it was allowed to progress.