I joined shallowbay.com a couple years ago and after awhile I was added to the team that runs the site. Early this year we became the official site for breaking benjamin. This meant that I had to quicky as in one night design a brand new site for breaking benjamin. Once again I used wordpress as the CMS / blog for the site. This was a very lite and temporary site that was up from the time of taking over as the official site until the current site was launched back on August 1^st. I was responsable for handling all of the CSS/xHTML work and also designing all of the graphics.

Once I had the main site done it was time to tackle the forums. The forum software used is vBulletin and this was my first time ever diving into vB. For being a very complex piece of software the customization was actually very easy. Included with the vB customizing was recoloring all of the vB icons to match the brown style of the new vB theme.

As much as I hate myspace it is an extremely valuable tool. With the help of some work on myspace done by Mike Davidson I was able to get a matching myspace layout done. There are so many little tips and tricks needed to make myspace behave, so it quickly gave me a headache. One of the biggest issues with myspace is having to try and figure out how to style just certain aspects of the page. This usually winds up with code like “table table table td” and then you just hope that it does not screw up any other parts of the page that you do not want affected.

Now that I had all of the breaking benjamin sites updated and completed it was time to begin thinking about the new site that had to go up before the cd release.

For the current design I had very little to do with the actual design. I was mainly just responsible for the behind the scenes coding fo the site. Although I did do some work to polish up some of the graphics on the site. Transforming the site to the new design was a fairly easy process thanks to CSS and the easy customization of wordpress.

Things got pretty scary in late July. We had some storms that knocked the power out at my house, which caused my computer to shut down and fried one of my hard drives. It took my a day or two of messing with the computer to realize that that one drive was the cause for the rest of my IDE drives to not be found. Once I found that out I removed the drive and I was able to get back to work. Trouble did not end there. About a week or 2 later we had more, even bigger, storms. The storms came on Wednesday, but I lucked out and did not lose power, but on Friday morning we had another big storm roll through and that is when I lost power. At this point I am wonering just what else can go wrong. I was frantically trying to come up with how I am gonna finish the new site in time without power. Luckily the power came back on Saturday morning.

Over the next couple days from Saturday to Monday, when the new site was launched, I had put in over 25+ hours to basically build the entire site. Needless to say things were a little fantic.

For the forums I once again I skinned vB to match the new site. This time I went through and designed my own icons that matched the theme a quite bit better than the generic vB icons.

Lastly, I got to tackled myspace again. This time things were not so bad. All I had to do was change a few images and the color scheme and I was done.

The sites have been up for a few weeks now and I had really been wanting to write about them, but things have been crazy as usual. Doing these sites did provide me with the opportunity to photograph breaking benjamin at Pointfest 19 in St. Louis, MO. See my previous post for more on that. Don’t forget to check out my breaking benjamin pictures in the gallery.