Maybe. With all this down-sizing happening and the economy taking a real toll on businesses, we’ve decided to move into a smaller, more budget-friendly office. Even though the new space is going to be a lot smaller, we’ve put together a floor plan that we think will still bring a large amount of awesomeness and creativity to the mix. As you can see (or maybe you can’t because this image is crap quality), we’ve created an elevated area where we can get our work on. We’re thinking it’s going to be similar to a split-level home with stairs to get onto the elevated platform. There is also an area for the Accounting Department to do their thing.

I’m going to miss the massive amount of windows and sunshine we currently have, but what can you do. I thought about framing lightboxes on the walls with birds chirping and nature sounds (or something). I don’t know yet. Either way, the new office is going to be intense.

I also tossed around the idea of painting the walls green with white vines and leaves coming out of the corners/edges to portray our unspoken commitment to “going green”. I’ll keep everyone updated with our progress on the move.

So I guess it’s safe to say that I’ve finally been converted to WordPress. I’ve been trying for so long (more than two years) to say no and it was finally mandated at work that I start using it. One of our clients was very persistent on using WordPress as a content-management solution. I have to be honest though, it’s unbelievably easy to use. And I don’t mean that it’s just easy to update your website content.. It’s easy to create templates (sorry, themes) for it too.

I’ll probably post a lot of links about helpful websites and code snippets that have helped me do what I need to do in WordPress. I already have a few in the back of my mind that I’ve come across while I’ve been developing the current theme for my site (at the time of writing this post, the theme is shades of gray with green and blue accents).

I’ve also started porting some of the posts from my old website to this new system. The information doesn’t link exactly, so there are a lot of broken links and blurry images, but I should have it fixed soon. I’m sure there are more things I could say about it, but I really want to get the new WordPress-powered site/blog up tonight so I’ll leave the rest for another post.

Recently, I’ve decided to revamp some of our proprietary products at work. Some of the products that I’ve been wanting to update for a while now are: the outward-facing BHI Marketing Tools website, our Rotating Banner (written in AS3) and our FLV Player (also written in AS3).

We’ve been wanting to redesign our business website, BHI Design, ever since I started working here. But let’s be honest – that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. So! Out of boredom – and a lack of anything better to do – I redesigned our sister website, BHI Marketing Tools, a website that I started about two years ago as an additional revenue source. The new design is fully implemented and includes features that we really needed for a while. Some of the features include: our parent business’ contact information, a little auto-biography about the company and what we do, a completely different approach to our previous implementation of AJAX Forms (client login, feedback, etc), our featured projects, links to our Twitter and Facebook accounts and a way for visitors to join our electronic newsletter list.

I really like the new layout and I think it conveys our message to visitors better than the previous version. We still have to migrate the application interface (what our clients see) to reflect the homepage a little better, but that isn’t very important at the moment.

I’ve also rewritten two of our smaller projects: FLV Player [AS3] and Rotating Banner [AS3]. As many of you can probably imagine, FLV Player is a simple video player that can stream any FLV file to your website. It supports any length of video and has been tested up to resolutions of 1280×720. There isn’t a fullscreen mode yet, but it will definitely be added to any future releases if we get a request for it. The Rotating Banner is pretty self-explanatory. You load the SWF onto your website and point it to an XML file containing image URLs, hyperlinks, transition type, etc. Both of these projects can be seen in action on the BHI Marketing Tools website. (I know it seems like I’m trying to promote the crap out of that website, but it’s where most of my projects end up being used).

So, check them out. Let me know if you like them. If you have any questions or comments, please post them. Thanks!