Varsity Boot Company
A fully-interactive ecommerce site, Varsity Boot Company's site allows the visitor to customize a pair of boots with their college logo, Greek affiliation, their name, leather selection, and many other options. All customization takes place in real-time with the use of AJAX and jQuery to create an easy-to-use and attractive customer experience. Options are updated in a separate section of the screen as soon as they are made, thus keeping the site visitor constantly appraised of exactly what they have "built" as they add options to their order.
FireFlie.com: TourScout
The FireFlie project is an ongoing effort to assist musicians, fans, and venues to link up with one another. Bands and musicians can easily set up their areas inside FireFlie, post their recordings, efforts, and members (with the now de riguer automatic connections to Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook), fans can browse groups and performing venues in their areas, and of great utility, bands can set up their tour schedules, complete with emails and confirmations to venues and mass-mailings to their fanbase. WebSpry Consulting built the tour creator from scratch based on requirements from bands and venues, and we are justifiably proud of it. Watch this space for further enhancements to FireFlie.com as they are created by WebSpry Consulting.
FireFlie.com: Searchlight
Another part of the FireFlie project, Searchlight gives musicians the ability to input a set of criteria (in an almost eHarmony way) for other musicians based on their location, dedication to forming a musical group, instruments, proficiency and other categories--and to then search the FireFlie database for like-minded cohorts with which to perform. There's nothing like this on the web for performing artists, and it sets FireFlie.com apart. WebSpry Consulting created this search facility from the ground up. Note the convenient AJAX-based sliders for setting parameters.
Broken Consort Technologies
BCT is a consortium of musicians who happen to also be deeply involved in technology. Or, vice versa. Their goal is to offer assistance to community musicians and ensembles worldwide with quality, low-cost (free, whenever possible) web applications which assist these organizations in the care and feeding of running a non-profit group. A partner site, BCT's website is meant to serve as an online brochure about the services and products they offer--many of which were created, designed, and implemented by WebSpry Consulting. Pay them a visit and volunteer!
Higgason Law
Robert Higgason is a Houston area appellate lawyer who wished to have a calm, elegant website to which he could direct his prospective clients. Relying on architectural motifs, Mr. Higgason's site serves as a way for him to publicize his activities and cases, as well as to showcase his voluminous legal writings.
The GearBase project
The GearBase Project is an elegant solution to an age-old problem: If you were forced to identify, specifically, "stuff" you had in your home, your studio, your rehearsal space--could you do it? Still have those ownership records handy? Know the serial numbers to your Kurzweil or your Marshall amp or your horn? No, I didn't think so. Neither can I, and that's a Bad Thing (tm). The Gearbase, and its sister project, SecureDMS, is an easy-to-use document management system. Take pictures of your stuff, scan it in, upload it to The Gearbase, and voila--your ownership and maintenance information is always safe. Stored on a secure server, always backed up, and always accessible. Gearbase.org and SecureDMS.net are still being developed as of this writing (1 July 2009) but watch this space for details on the launch date.
Good stuff in...
Good Stuff is another "family of sites" project. Still in development and design, it will serve as a clearinghouse for live music in a given metropolitan area. The project has started small, covering Houston, Galveston, and Beaumont TX, but after the alpha and beta periods are over, it will expand to cover a set of 22 major metropolitan areas in the United States. The premise is that location matters--why would anyone wish to search a nationwide list of performances when they live in Dallas? Conversely, while many music venues have their own calendars, that is too narrow of a search. With logins for fans, bands, band's PR representatives, and the further ability for the performers to set up fan clubs, interest groups, and other special areas, it is the best of FaceBook, MySpace, and a media/fan site without all the extra, non-essential advertising and claptrap.
HyperLibrary
The HyperLibrary is a simple application, really--it allows participating music organizations to have any number of logins to the system which allow their music library to be entered, edited, and maintained. Full-text search is available, program notes, difficulty, style, ensemble type, and other information can be attached to each piece. Library numbers are automatically assigned. The location of pieces can be listed, and full reports can be printed. The best part is that partcipating ensembles can search other groups' libraries and initiate requests for loans between organizations. The HyperLibrary is coded completely in PERL with MySQL as the data tier. Membership is free for all community and civic organizations. You can read more about The Hyperlibrary Project here or simply visit the site.
The More About... family
Early in 2007 I created a family of sites, all being .info domains beginning with moreabout... in their names. The charge was to create sites which were similar in design and operation but which could be infinitely expanded to include many different topics. The outcome is the More About family. These sites have sophisticated data layer design which sends them out onto the cloud to find images, topics, articles, and other materials to automatically incorporate into the site, thus creating a self-populating website on a given topic or groups of topics. The back-end programming is all done in PERL and the websites themselves are in PHP. Sites include More About Music, More About Politics, and More About Education, with twelve more sites in the works.
The Open Horn
In addition to his personal blog, Mr. Burtis also expressed interest in a full-featured, easily managed web forum. The design, built on the industry-leading Simple Machines Forum software, incorporates a number of custom plugins and enhancements, as well as a completely original theme with rotating header images of Sam's beloved New York City. The site is The Open Horn, on which frank and open discussions on a variety of topics take place.
Sam Burtis, musician
Sam Burtis, a noted and oft-recorded trombonist, tubist, composer, and arranger, has his own site, SamBurtis.com, on which he shares his decades of insight into the art and craft of playing brass instruments. In addition to his musical activities, Sam is an author of several books on the art of brass playing. He wanted a website on which he could both discuss his teaching methods and performance activities; this site is the result.