Actionopolis.com


ShannonDenton.comSite Name: Actionopolis.com
Site URL: http://www.actionopolis.com

Back in 2005 I wrote two Juvenile Fiction novels for Komikwerks, which were to be published under their Actionopolis banner. The publishers, Shannon Denton and Patrick Coyle, were struggling to keep their webcomics portal going while launching this new book company and realized they needed technical help in both endeavors. They brought me in December on as a partner in order to leverage my web skills.

By the end of February we had Actionopolis.com online, ready to promote the book launch. The site needed to be attractive and agile…displaying the books, enabling easy updates and inviting the authors and illustrators from the line to participate in adding content to the site.

Patrick Coyle worked up the initial visual design for the site with input from Shannon and myself.

I handled the technical aspected of breaking the visuals down to CSS/XHTML and installing the content management backend. Over the six months leading up to the actual launch of the books, I’ve continued to extend the content managment system and alter the look of the site.

In late June we decided that coding for 800×600 was resulting in a cramped, cluttered front page that probably only accomdated a small fraction of the audience. I revamped the design to widen it for a 1024 pixel screen and reduced a lot of the textual clutter. This meant that four of the seven launch books were now completely visible above the fold.

Skills Employed

  1. Installed the surprisingly flexible b2evolution as our primary Content Management (CM) system.
  2. Employed intensive PHP scripting to push the CMS beyond its primary blogging purpose and into a book-centric system.