Blog for July 2010

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Visual Lizard Launches the Nellie McClung Foundation Website

ournellie.com-homepage

Visual Lizard is proud to officially announce the launch of http://www.ournellie.com for the Nellie McClung Foundation. We worked with our friends at KIK Strategy and Blindside Creative to bring it all together.

The site contains a wealth of information about Nellie McClung (Wikipedia link on Nellie McClung), but more importantly, it challenges us to remember that it was not so long ago that women were not considered persons in the eyes of the law. Nellie McClung helped to change that and forever change the course of history in Canada.

Some of the interesting bits of the site that we got to build, aside from a gorgeous design from Rob, are:

  • a special module for our Catalyst CMS to handle pull quotes, or specifically in this case, Words of Wisdom from Nellie.
  • a tool for creating a timeline from within Catalyst. You can see the public results at http://www.ournellie.com/womens-suffrage/history-of-womens-rights.
  • an interesting system for managing source information which comprises the archives found at http://www.ournellie.com/primary-sources. This area of the site is setup to allow it to grow to any size.
  • a tie into our email system so that the staff at the Foundation can manage their electronic mailing list, get stats back on what they send out, and much more. I'll save the specifics for when we launch our site around the mailing system (hint: look for a future post on that).
  • a special visual separation between the corporate site and the public site. We will let you discover that for yourself. Go exploring.

As always, we very proud to have a project we have worked on go live. It has been very busy around here of late, which is odd for mid-summer, but we love it. Cheers to everyone involved~!

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On The Road To A New Web Site - Photography

In 1996, when we started Visual Lizard, we didn't have a web site. The Internet had just started to appear on the landscape of everyday use. In fact, at the time, there wasn't even a web host in Winnipeg that had a working server, but that is a different story. 

One of our first tasks after opening the doors, was to put up a web page no matter the effort. We worked on and learned about the web as we went. We built a site in good old HTML 3.2. Since 1996, we have had 7 official versions of VisualLizard.com.

For our upcoming VisualLizard.com version 8, we decided that we needed to get some proper team and staff shots done. Photography is important in helping convey our personality and who we are to our clients. In the past, we have been using pictures of the team that were taken at random intervals over a couple of years. They where alright, but the new site needs to take things up a level. We needed proper lighting, uniform focus, retouching of our ugliness, and, most importantly, someone who could hold a camera properly. Of course we turned to our long-time collaborator in Jerry Grajewski. Coincidentally we had just launched GrajewskiFotograph.com.

Our 1.5 hour photo shoot with Jerry was a ton of fun. We had some laughs. We all posed like the super models we are. We broke one of Jerry's lights. Well, we didn't break it directly. It died while trying to make Max visible. After all of that, we now have a great set of staff photos and an awesome team photo. The team photo is posted below to give you an idea of where our staff page on the new site is going to go. It should also give you an idea of what sort of wizard Jerry is, since we all look great. Thanks Jerry!

Visual Lizard Team 2010