BrainFuel

We at Tornado recently teamed up with local agency Propeller on a web site project for a local bakery. We did the design and development of the new Chocolate Star Bakery web site. Chocolate Star bakes cookies. Not just your every day cookies – really good cookies.

We did all of the design using Adobe Photoshop and built the pages using Macromedia Dreamweaver.

We used the Early Impact ProductCart shopping cart for the back-end e-commerce system. This tool works so beautifully it’s incredible. This software is so simple to use I was able to integrate the front end interface with the back-end in approximately 1 hour. Now we had to do much more to get the site ready to launch but that’s how simple they’ve made their e-commerce application.

Update: Mark has a great comment and question about why the image on the home page is so big that you have to scroll to see the navigation bar. We have a very good reason for this: The client wanted it this way, even when we carefully explained that internet users want to be able to see the navigation bar, and they want to have it above the fold, we didn’t win. We wanted to make that photo smaller, but they wanted it bigger. Our other design concepts all had the navigation above the fold similar to the sub pages (except we had it horizontal under the gingham pattern) and it would have worked beautifully, however this time things didn’t quite work out the way we wanted on the homepage. Thanks for the good question, Mark. Even with these considerations the site turned out great and people are placing orders.

Cool web site that makes a Favicon from a photo.

Spreading around today but worth posting about. How companies got their names.

My favorites are:

“eBay – Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. “Echo Bay” didn’t refer to the town in Nevada, the nature area close to Lake Mead, or any real place. “It just sounded cool,” Omidyar reportedly said. When he tried to register EchoBay.com, though, he found that Echo Bay Mines, a gold mining company, had gotten it first. So, Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com. “

“Volvo – From the Latin word “volvo”, which means I roll. “

I found this neat website today that will actually scale your images to huge sizes and gives you a PDF file you can print. Usually the photos print on 20-30 pages and once you line them up correctly form really cool scaled composit images.

I have just printed out two photos and plan to do more soon. Check out the gallery they made.

Andrew Smith forwarded me this link to a site with free comic fonts and letter typefaces. It’s pretty neat. Might be useful for a banner graphic or something.