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1996
MediaCity grew slowly and continued talks to be eventually bought by SoftNet, Systems, Inc. mid-year. The 4 partners Bob Evans, Les Laky, Brian-who left soon, and I went with the deal, and I spent the next 3+ years at SoftNet. 1996 was my highest number of web site. The move to SoftNet meant fewer external sites and more focus over time on internal sites and design work.

Roses - A prototype site for the rosebowl parade. (We were in talks with the Herald Tribune to get them online-this was a small part of the presentation.) I think this is probably one of the best looking home pages I ever made, and compared to the official site that year, beat them hands-down. Be sure to see the parade route animated gif.

Francophonie - A huge site for me in several ways. This was seen by high ranking public officials in France in 1996 when MediaCity was trying to show them a solution to this problem: how does a world travelling Frenchman keep up with his home town news and the government fight against the Americanization of the internet. (How we ever thought they would hire an American company to do this work is a bit beyond me now in retrospect.)
  There is a lot of depth here, but use the text links to move between countries, the image maps all require a server which has long since disappeared-I may redo them one day as this is an amazing site. I drew all the maps, made all the image maps and hooked it up myself-a big task given the short time frame.
  Also amazing is the fact that all of the text in the newspapers you'll find if you click around a bit is in French. I had to OCR the text and proofread the French-even though I don't speak the language. It isn't perfect, but was good enough for this massive prototype.
  This project came to an abrupt halt as we were finally getting close to a deal because of an event I read about in the news. President Metterand (sorry if I spelled that wrong) had recently died, his Doctor wrote a none-too-flattering expose book that the government was trying to suppress. When the full text showed up on the Inernet, that medium lost favor for a while.
  About six months later, I had to re-create this site from the ground up when talks with the French government recommenced and just after I had a serious hard disk crash losing the first version.

Benin - This was a followup to the Francophonie site and was timed for the once-each-5-year meeting of French speaking nations held their meeting in Benin Africa. Again, the image maps on the maps are not currently working, but the text links work.

Caffe Focaccia - A great looking one page menu that will make your mouth water.

Artic - Elegant site. Another example of what you can do with good images.

Stanford European - Some image heavy sites that recreated some very nice looking drool catalogs.

Check Guarantee - A one pager but nice use of tables.

AutoLend - I took a complicated set of forms and organized a nice little 3 step process. Nice background.

Syndicate - An early version of a site I still update. Also see Vocabulary.

Cable Co-op - A prototype for a local Cable Company and soon to be one of the first companies hooking their customers up to high speed cable modems. I it was interesting and humorous that my first couple of design meetings was with a top person at the company that was nearly blind.

MCW mid 96 - With a new logo came a new version of my company's home site.

MCW mid 96 - ...and a few variations on the theme.

MCW Sales - A prototype version of an internal sales pricing site for MediaCity.

mcCreative - An internal site while at MediaCity to help educate new sales staff about the ins and outs of web site design and sales. See the site logistics area for some of my early design philosophy.

Tamarack - An early scanner maker. We traded a 3 of their scanners for some of the early work. Two of them actually lasted a few months longer than the company before they died.

24hrFlorist - Simple 2 page site, but above the norm at the time.

Neal Richards - Mostly their images, but it was a challenge to get it looking like the original print versions.

McMullen - Mostly their images, but looks good anyhow.

Golf America - Nice site with golf course backgrounds.

Nvest - Little content, but nice design.

We Copy Floppies - Not glitzy, but functional prototype.

DMVexpress - An interesting service, these guys would stand in line at the DMV for busy people. The fake licence plates were my idea, the 2 guys was at their urging.

Computer City - A prototype that never saw the light of day, but shows a nice clean style.

MBE - A prototype site for a Canadian branch of Mail Boxes Etc. in the days before there was a corporate site.

LATronics - An early protoype for a LA Electronics Superstore.

Comsul - Simple site. An early example of the 3d Buttons that suddenly became easier to make with a photoshop extension I got about this time and got old soon thereafter.

Sycard - Very simple site put here for the sake of posterity.

TIG - A simple site with the emphasis on content.

AMT - Cool images. Prototype site.

Book - My part was making the images of the cover of this online book. The idea was that the novel was to be released one chapter at a time-can't remember what the pricing model was.

Keystar - Weird guitars, just a prototype that never went too much farther.