Where have you been, man?

I know you’ve all been worried, wondering where I’ve been. So I’m posting just to let you know that everything’s cool. I’ve been hard at work catching up on projects so that I could get the new Circle Six site going. And I did get it going. It’s almost finished, I just have to get a few portfolio pieces into it and it will be ready to go live.

I ended up using Ultimate Tag Warrior to handle the client names, with each portfolio piece tagged with the client’s name. Then I used on of the template tags to create a recent clients list in the sidebar. On the archives page there’s a tag cloud that shows which clients are our largest clients based on the number of entries they have in our portfolio.

The titles of each piece are descriptive and can be pulled into a list of Recent Projects in the sidebar. I can exclude all of the news categories from the listing and just have it automatically produce the list while I post away. I added a category called “Special”, and anything that appears in that category in addition to its regular category is ignored in the sidebar. That allows me to have pieces like the Flash piece I did for Circle Six’s brochure on the site without it showing up in the Client List.

The optional excerpt for each piece contains the thumbnail for the piece. I then created a template for the portfolio page that pulls each portfolio category (web, print, audio, video) one at a time and displays just the excerpt, creating a gallery of icons that are linked to their descriptive entries. Within the post for each piece is a thumbnail linked to a full size image and a link to a site when appropriate.

It will be up by tomorrow, I think, and I’m really excited! This is going to be very cool. I have to warn everybody, though, that this is a departure from my usual design style, in that it’s a little cleaner and more corporate than I usually do. But I thought it was about time I cleaned up our professional image ;-).