Mark L. Brenner PH.D MFT, is one of the most respected national Marriage and Family Therapists in the field of early childhood development, adolescence, and high-conflict family issues. Known commonly as “The Family Whisperer”, Dr. Brenner helps children and families make stunning changes with his most unusual brand of house calls.
Initial Client Analysis
Byron Baker Design began this project with the sole purpose of helping Dr. Brenner to help others, and present his services in the professional light that they deserve. Among our design considerations was to give the end user a feeling of who Dr. Brenner was with special emphasis on his credentials, national broadcast appearances, numerous books, lecture series, and his unique house calls. With all this to cover, our journey began…
Wireframe and Initial Layouts
We began with an analysis of Dr. Brenner's needs, and the needs of his user base. With more and more people accessing web based content by mobile devices, we choose a static landscape layout. This layout presents many advantages to developing for mobile devices such as iPhone and iPad, by allowing the user to maximize the devices screen real estate. Additionally, we chose to exclude Adobe Flash from this entire project in favor of Javascript and specifically jQuery. By making this decision early in the design, we set the coarse for all interaction and motion graphics in this project.
Our final layout used high contrast black and white for the primary color palette as a subtle and professional touch. We also chose to use jQuery to allow the user to advance through the pages with a sliding affect activated by touch numbered buttons, keeping the viewport fixed. This allows the user to easily navigate the site with touch events on a mobile device. Sliders were also employed for horizontal scrolling of content.
mmmmmmm….. Javacript
This website is our heaviest use of jQuery to date. All navigation menus employ custom jQuery scripting to create drop downs and sliding content. Dr. Brenner had requested that much of the content be accessible to the user throughout the site. By employing menus into the primary navigation, we provided the user with the option to access all major portions of the website.
All copy was presented in a custom jQuery slider that allows the content to be broken into small viewable segments, which are indexed by number. Our goal was to not overwhelm the reader with large amounts of text, and hold interest by allowing them to access the following page, or subsequent pages, through indexed numbers. We also used custom event handling to change the images shown next to the copy in many sections to enhance the users experience.
Contact & Information Done Right
For those of you who have a publicly accessible website containing your email, you know what happens….. SPAM. It is a inconvenient truth of the internet today, if you put your companies email out on the web, or if you employ contact or lead forms without certain precautions, you are going to get a visit from the SPAM demon. We want our clients to only receive information and requests when they are valid, so we employed a nice AJAX driven contact form with security precautions that allows visitors to Parent Fitness to easily contact Dr. Brenner, without Dr. Brenner having to worry about SPAM.
We also provided a convenient map to Dr. Brenner’s office in Sherman Oaks, California via the Google Maps API. This map goes one step further, by allowing the user to get driving directions to Dr. Brenner’s office via location information provided within the browser.
Twitter API Integration
We created a custom Twitter API class to pull all of the latest tweets from Dr. Brenner’s Twitter account. Because Twitter receives such an enormous amount of requests, we set up a local cron job on the server that pulls in the latest Tweets and caches them to a local file. This not only helps Twitter, but helps improve the load time of Dr. Brenner’s custom Twitter application.
Dr. Brenner’s Twitter app also uses the latest @anywhere technology from Twitter, allowing guest to hover over @mentions and other information contained in Tweets to see information about Dr. Brenner and his followers. Very custom, very nice, and a very effective way for visitors to view the latest from Dr. Brenner without leaving the website.
Custom Magento Shopping Cart
Magento is quickly becoming the most popular open source shopping cart on the web today. We prefer Magento for its model-view-controller (MVC) structure, and the ability to access the large amount of extensions available within the Magento community.
Dr. Mark L. Brenner – Store is a custom Magento shopping cart that was themed to match the Parent Fitness website. Dr. Brenner has the ability to sell all of his content from books, to DVD’s, to audio and video downloads all within the Magento cart. Another great advantage of the Magento platform is great SEO and custom reporting for monitoring sales.
Custom Video, No You Tube Here
Dr. Brenner has had many guest appearances on popular television shows such as “The Today Show” and “The View.” With the growing importance of delivery to mobile devices and many browsers, we developed a custom PHP class to detect the end users device platform and browser. With this information, we deliver the proper content to the user so that video plays seamlessly on any device. We also created custom interfaces for viewing video content, so that the user had the option of viewing the content on a simulated flat screen TV, or going full screen.
The Finally
It was an absolute pleasure working with Dr. Brenner, and helping him to showcase his many ventures through an interactive website. This website entices interaction from the user to learn more about the services that Dr. Brenner offers, and promotes the use of social networking and a contact form to reach Dr. Brenner. I would like to personally thank Dr. Mark L. Brenner for the opportunity to showcase such a rich collection of hard work and dedication.