The Lambda Literary Foundation nurtures, celebrates and preserves LGBT literature through programs that honor excellence, promote visibility and encourage development of emerging writers. Their website was a traditional blog that was outgrowing its usefulness. It was hard to navigate, hard to maintain and hard to find relevant reviews. Tekpals helped Lambda Literary update their site to a magazine format. This new format make the site easier to use and gave it a much cleaner look and feel. In addition we added several innovative features to make it easy for the staff at Lambda Literary to update the site and post new articles.

The new site features a slider that allows readers to slide through the most recent articles along with cleaner navigation to easily find articles in popular categories – like a newspaper or magazine. We also integrated the site with Facebook and allow commenters to login with either their site id or their Facebook id.

Ed has been working with Taproot as a pro bono tech developer. He was the technical project manager and a lead developer on a team that recently completed a new website for Stagebridge. Stagebridge is a non-profit that is transforming how people view and experience aging. They were looking for a new website.

The existing website was not well organized and it was difficult to find what you wanted. Rather then start this project redesigning the site, Ed suggested that we take a step back and look at the organization. Who is Stagebridge and what is their message.

A website is a vehicle to deliver a message. If the original message isn’t clear there’s no way the site will be clear. So we focused on developing the short elevator speech with Stagebridge. We brainstormed on what they do to relentlessly focus on a small number of core, easy to understand messages. We came up with four: see, play, transform and learn. These four topics became the basis for the new site.

By using WordPress as our website development environment, we were able to let Stagebridge concentrate on their content and refine their message while we efficiently developed the new site.

The new site used these four core areas to fully express Stagebridge’s message. The site was built entirely in WordPress and delivered in a very short time frame. In fact, the majority of the time of this project was business brainstorming rather than technical design.

Chuck Forester, a noted San Francisco author, was looking for a way to showcase his new novel and an outlet to blog about items of interest. Chuck’s novels follow a circle of gay men from the 1970′s and over the next several decades. He was looking for a site that used images to give readers an idea of the excitement and the challenges of this time.

We developed a WordPress child theme site that uses images to show gay life a few decades back. We also made this theme easy navigate and clear to read. By writing a child WordPress theme, we were able to deliver a fast and economical solution to Chuck.

Some of Chuck’s material is not intended for all audiences. He wanted his site to be accessible to all, yet also clearly mark portions of the site that may not be appropriate for everyone. We created a specific look for the section intended for adults and also provided a clear message ensuring that everyone feels welcomed while only those wishing to see the adult oriented discussions are able to access those areas.

eTrouble.net – Portions of this site are NSFW.

StudioMoon, an identity design firm in San Francisco, recently hired Tekpals to develop several WordPress sites. These sites, referred to as StyleSites, are an online graphic standards guide that covers many important aspects of the client’s identity and makes it easy to download art on an as-needed basis.[more] These sites are used to transfer important information and files to key vendors, educate and train new employees, stay up to date on any changes to the company’s visual image, and help their client better understand the “visual spirit” of the company.

StudioMoon wanted to use WordPress to develop the sites and had very specific requirements on the site structure and design. One of the requirements was a distinct navigation system consisting of a horizontal main menu and vertical sub menus. When a user selects on a main menu item, the corresponding sub menu will open in the left column. Tekpals built this customized navigation system leveraging the native WordPress 3.0+ navigation feature. This allows StudioMoon to easily change the navigation as needed while also leveraging their knowledge of WordPress.

Since the client is focused on graphic design elements, they had very specific requirements on the layout of the pages. Tekpals worked with StudioMoon to ensure that the page layout was exactly what they wanted. When there were differences between what was available on print and the web, we showed the client various options and the noted the advantages and disadvantages of each option.

By leveraging the power of WordPress, we’ve been able to quickly and easily develop customized Stylesites for many of StudioMoon’s clients.

Keoni Movement Arts feels that our NYC community needs a place where people with limited means and encouragement can come and learn these movement art forms. KMA is passionate about providing an affordable venue whereby people who have a deep desire to learn these disciplines can come and do so. In particular, gymnastics is often quite expensive to participate in and therefore out of reach to many who may have the talent and desire to learn it, but not the means. The organization is creating an infrastructure and a nurturing environment to facilitate safe participation in gymnastics — alongside dance and yoga — to meet this need. In Paul’s experience, yoga and dance will facilitate the learning of gymnastics in a safe and harmonious manner. KMA will welcome People with Special Needs, people who face obesity challenges, Gay/Lesbian/Bixexual/Transgendered disenfranchised youth, among other specific target populations.

The Toolbox is a friendly neighborhood bar in New York’s Upper East Side. The owners of this bar were looking to modernize their website. They were using another easy to use hosing service, but were not satisfied with the limits imposed by predefined templates. Their site was looking dated. They were also looking for a way to integrate their FaceBook presence and link a bar blog to FaceBook.

Tekpals transformed their site to a modern looking functional design. The bar owners are able to update their own content and move away from a limited, and expensive, template web host. Recognizing the immediate nature of their business, Tekpals developed a distinct mobile version of the site to drive traffic from people out in the area. The mobile version of the site makes it easy to see the site on most any mobile device while also keeping the site maintenance clean and simple. The site automatically shows the mobile version if it detects a mobile device is browsing the site.

Playland Not At the Beach is a museum of fun celebrating amusement parks of a bygone era. Playland features loads of working amusements and they’re open for the public and for special parties for adults and children. They were in need of a feature rich eCommerce platform to sell souvenirs and memorabilia to collectors all over the world.

Tekpals delivered a full eCommerce site in just a few weeks using a widely supported open source platform. This platform was customized to meet the needs of Playland and integrate with the look and feel of their existing site.

In addition, we trained Playland’s staff to use the store to fulfill orders and add and modify catalog items so that they’re pretty much self sufficient.

Kevin Fong, President of Elemental Partners a business adviser to hundreds of organizations, came to Tekpals frustrated that his existing web developer was changing him for content changes. He wanted an easy way to add and modify content on his site. He was also looking for a fast turnaround time; he was preparing for a conference presentation and wanted his new site up and running in time for this presentation.

Tekpals built his site using WordPress so that Kevin had full control over his content. Further, we were able to accommodate Kevin’s design requirements by customizing WordPress to meet his design needs.

Tekpals completed this assignment and trained Kevin how to enter his content with plenty of time for Kevin to showcase his new site at his presentation!

Sacred Touch for Men is Ed’s bodywork site where he takes a break from his technical self and exercises the other side of his brain. This site was recently rewritten using tpSunrise, Tekpals new theme.

This sites uses a custom child theme of tpSunrise to add several customizations to the parent theme while still allowing easy upgrades in the future. The site is also a good example of using the home page to communicate the short, simple elevator speech of what’s the site all about. Yet, there’s still plenty of detailed information should the reader want to examine the details. This is an example of providing just the right amount of content to introduce the reader to the site and get the reader’s attention quickly.

You’ll notice when exploring this site that the blog isn’t just added on; it’s actually integrated. For example the home page shows links to the most recent blog posts. It grabs the reader’s attention and clicks through to the blog. These links are automatic – they don’t have to be changed with each now blog entry.

Ed uses email newsletters to keep in touch with his clients. The site not only includes links to all the newsletters, but also allows interested visitors to automatically sign up to receive future newsletters.

The site is also has an integrated calendar and contact form so that clients can see what appointment times are available and easily set up appointments.

Sacred Touch for Men – Portions of this site are NSFW.

Sacred Touch School uses multi-media on-line education to help adults become more erotically embodied. Tekpals built a site featuring audio and over 15 hours of video. We were able to completely integrate the video using multiple formats so that the movies can be easily viewed.

The School uses a third party billing provider and Tekpals integrated the site with this provider so members can easily logon to access the media files.

We also automated the repetitive work managing multiple copies of large video files to make ongoing maintenance much easier.

At the same time, we leveraged WordPress so that the School can make their own changes to the site content without needing outside assistance.