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Archive | Blog

Latest Launch: Harbor Humane Society

March 19, 2013 • Blog, News

harbor-blogHere at Blue Sky Sessions we love animals. We also love building great websites. These interests came together when we had the opportunity to partner with Harbor Humane Society to build a new website!

Pets have an uncanny ability to brighten your day – something which we strived to express in the design of the site. We decided to move away from the subdued pastal color pallet used in the old Harbor Humane Society website and towards something bright  - these bold colors express the activity, energy, and playfulness experienced when working with dogs and cats at the shelter. Through the design we were also able to direct visitors to the three key needs of the shelter: adopting, donating, and volunteering.

As a team, Blue Sky Sessions was able to work closely with the marketing manager at Harbor Humane Society to bring the site to life. Head over to our portfolio listing of this project to learn more about what we built for Harbor Humane Society!

 

Seats to fill!

December 6, 2012 • Blog, News


2012 has been a big year for Blue Sky Sessions and as a result we have seats to fill! We have been blessed with both new projects and continuing work with our current ones, we are looking to flesh out our team with some new talent to help us take on what may come next year.

We are currently looking for an account manager and a junior web developer to join our team – head over to our careers section to learn more and apply!

Restricting date input with jQueryUI date picker

September 18, 2012 • Blog, Technical

We are currently in the process of some post-launch tweaks to a web application we recently launched for a client. The application handles their B2B orders via a new web portal which we designed and built from the from the ground up using Ruby on Rails (3.2), Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

One of the new requirements for the app was to add the following restrictions to the pickup date for their orders:

  • No pickup is allowed on weekends
  • Pickup date must be, at minimum, two business days following the order date

Initially I thought it would be easy. The datepicker offers a minDate parameter to set an offset from the current day, and a beforeShowDay parameter which can filter out selected days, coupled with very helpful datepicker.noWeekends function for disabling selection of weekends. My first solution was this:


$('.date').datepicker({
dateFormat: 'yy-mm-dd',
minDate : 2, //Set two business Days Restriction
beforeShowDay: $.datepicker.noWeekends //Disable Weekends
});

I soon realized that this solution, while working very well, was incomplete – it allows dates to be selected without the ’2 business days’ minimum around weekends. This is because the minDate and beforeShowDay parameters are ignorant of each other, so for example an order placed friday could be scheduled for pickup Monday, when it should be Tuesday at minimum instead.

My final solution was to build a custom function that would set the minimum offset dynamically based on the current day of the week – this would map Sunday to Wednesday, Thursday to Monday, etc. I built this function using a switch statement so it was most readable, even though this might not be the succinct or optimized form. The result of my work is below:

Site Launch – Almost Heaven Saunas

March 1, 2012 • Blog, News


Almost Heaven has been partnering with Blue Sky Sessions to manage their website and expand its features for several years, but now it was finally our turn to put a fresh face on it. We are excited to show you the latest incarnation of the Almost Heaven Saunas website.

Click here to go to the portfolio page and learn about this project.

Site Launch: Westshore Innovative Network

February 12, 2012 • Blog, News


Blue Sky Sessions designed and developed a new landing page for the Westshore Innovative Network to highlight the different competencies of their member businesses.

Click here to go to our portfolio and learn more about this project!

New Portfolio Project – Chef Container

January 8, 2012 • Blog, News


Chef Container needed some help with their site. They wanted to add features, but their site wasn’t working well enough to be a platform they could grow on for the future. Blue Sky Sessions designed and developed a new site using WordPress content management and has partnered with Chef Container for a website management contract that will insure that their site does not go neglected.

Click here to see more in our project portfolio!

New Portfolio Project – Park Township website redesign

April 1, 2010 • Blog, News

Park Township, on the north side of Holland, MI, has been a satisfied customer of our sister company Worksighted for a long time, so when it was time to redesign their website they trusted that we could do great things for them.

We helped Park Township bring the design of their site up to date, re-organize the content on the site for easy access, and implemented a great content management system to help them keep the site up to date.