We recently completed a massive web site project for Australian United States Services in Education, or AUSSIE for short. AUSSIE is a New York based educational consulting company, with hundreds of consultants providing professional development services to schools around the country. AUSSIE’s old web site was a poor reflection of their forward-thinking and technologically-savvy work, so they hired us to help them build a new one.

The new site is powered by Drupal, our favorite content management platform, so AUSSIE has the power to do all of the day-to-day content and site management on their own. The site features blogs that will be available to all of their consultants, including audio and video content that will be streamed from the site and available in podcast form. The site uses SSL to encrypt the transfer of sensitive information like passwords, and ties in to AUSSIE’s event management service at eventbrite.com and PayPal account to handle online sales of their Teaching Comprehension CD ROM. Generally, the site provides AUSSIE the tools to meaningfully engage their huge educational community online.

On the the “front end” of the site, we worked with the graphic design supplied by an in-house designer to build a custom Drupal theme. The theme provides an engaging, attractive, and easy-to-use interface to the site, and of course it features code that’s semantic, valid, and optimized for search engines!

Lastly, importantly, we are providing thorough documentation and ongoing consultation to AUSSIE on how to use the site. We are excited to continue working with AUSSIE, both here at Dtek and at The Media Spot, where we are consulting with them on classroom technology integration. Check out the new aussiepd.com!

Dtek is excited to be working with a new partner! Brooklyn-based husband-and-wife team Heather Marold Thomason and Brad Thomason, AKA Bad Feather, provide graphic design and web development services focusing on brand identity, print work, and Adobe Flash.

Bad Feather’s services are the perfect compliment to our own, which are focused on non-Flash web development and coding, usability and user experience consultation, and web-specific graphic design. They’ll also help us keep pace on the web development front as The Media Spot continues its exciting work.

Bad Feather’s web site is on the way. If you’re curious in the meantime, check out Heather’s previous company, HM Projects.

Remember Arnold Schwarzenegger the body builder? Photographer-turned-documentary film making legend and founder of White Mountain Films George Butler introduced Arnie to the world with his 1976 film, Pumping Iron.

Butler has produced a great body of film and photography work since, and the old WMF website was not doing it justice. We took their existing branding and created a minimal layout to showcase their portfolio, film stills and photos. Under the hood, we gave the code an audit and overhaul for accessibility, search engine optimization, and ease-of-maintenance.

Keep an eye on whitemountainfilms.com for films on subjects as diverse as the ancient and thought-to-be-extinct Ivory Billed Woodpecker, and the ancient and soon-to-be retired football coach Bobby Bowden.

We recently built a web site for Seattle-based investor Alex Algård. The site is an initial Internet presence for Algård Ventures, and a fat-free way to connect him with groups looking for funding.

For us, it’s a great showcase of what we can deliver in a minimal project: elegant and clean graphic design and user interface with the i’s dotted and t’s crossed for accessibility and search engine optimization.

Check out algardventures.com.

ImpactGames, creator of PeaceMaker, recently launched a new interactive news gaming platform at playthenewsgame.com. The concept is that short interactive games are published often to the site, based on the latest major news events. Anyone can register for the site and “play” any of these news items by suggesting appropriate actions to be taken and predicting outcomes. Players interact with each other via game rankings and statistics, and discussions of the games.

Games can also be syndicated and embedded on your own web site or blog. Here’s the game that’s currently featured:

So far, we’ve just consulted with ImpactGames on specific aspects of the web site and user interface, but we hope to be more involved in future improvements to the platform.

Play the News is another innovative and gutsy project from the ImpactGames folks… Try it out!

[EDIT: changed the syndicated game to the one that was currently featured as of this writing...]