Providing information architecture, project management, techology leadership, professional technology consulting, and web application development for over 15 years.
Specializing in content management systems, brand & marketing presentation, mobile & desktop web applications, information architecture and web technology consultation services.
Featured Work
A Drupal 10 rebuild of a Philadelphia Arts & Culture leader.
Alphex, having supported The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage previous website for the previous 7 years, was asked to lead the technology development of a new website in partnership with CHIPS.NYC who was selected to update the visual design and user experience.
This project involved the migration of over 10,000 pieces of content from the old Drupal 7 site to Drupal 10, Alphex worked with CHIPS and the client to identify the core content strategy of the new visual experience, and conducted an exercise to map out the content migration process, and using Drupal's built in "Migration API", automated the migration, allowing us to work with live content, in real time, as the new website was built based on the new designs.
As part of their deliverable, CHIPS provided HTML/CSS/JS mockups that worked perfectly "in the browser", allowing Alphex to implement the custom theme, while adhering to the strict design and aesthetic requirements of the client while creating an extensible design system built in to the CMS which allows the client to build pages as they see fit to meet the business needs at the time with zero developer assistance.
You can read more about the redesign project at https://www.pewcenterarts.org/news/closer-look-centers-new-website
A comprehensive redesign and re-architcture of the Philadelphia Museum of Arts Contemporary Craft Show website
Seven years ago Alphex Information Solutions was responsible for the build of the original website for The Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show.
In the time since , Alphex and the client have supported the marketing and communication of the in person craft show at The Philadelphia Convention Center by providing a website that allows for the advertising and marketing of the 175 to 200 guest artists at each show.
With the events of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Craft Show was forced to go 100% virtual. In the summer of 2000, we began a design process to identify what it would take to host the craft show virtually.
In the end, we were able to host the live streaming of 15 artists, and the presentation of pre-recorded videos of over 100 others, and then help maintain the heart and soul of the show, even in a year when it couldn't be held in person.
As part of this process during 2020, The Womens Committee of The Philadelphia Museum of Arts authorized the re-design and rebuild of their website to bring it up to modern design standards and to support their on going efforts in running the show, but in person, and virually moving forward.
We're happy to say that the 2021 show will return to being an in person event, with some remote artists as well, leveraging the infrastructure we helped develop for the 2020 show, to participate via remote video streaming.
The redesign and rebuild of The Craft Show website was done using Figma and Drupal 9. In partnership with Morgan Pendergrass who provided the visual design and UX, Alphex proceeded to build the new content management system in Drupal 9 and train the client team on how to update and maintain the content. Using Drupal's robust and flexible architecture, we were able to develop a content management system that is easy to maintain and flexible to support the growing and changing needs of the show's marketing efforts over the future.
Rapid solutions to the pandemic at an Ivy league university.
https://presentations.curf.upenn.edu/
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, The University of Pennsylvania's Center for Undergraduate Research & Fellowships (CURF) faced the challenge of supporting a suddenly online-only student constituency with the academic services and functions they had traditionally held in person.
In previous years, CURF regularly held Research Poster sessions, in person and on campus, providing a forum for discussion and discovery around the work done by undergraduate researchers across disciplines - providing a place where students, faculty, and staff can learn from and discuss the work done by the diverse student body.
With a newly all-virtual student population still interested in presenting work, CURF sought out Alphex's expertise in Drupal to build, test, and deploy an application inside of 2 months that could provide a framework for a research poster session. It needed to be robust enough to handle 1,000+ simultaneous visitors, have protections in place for preprint research that could only be reviewed by Penn community members, and not place an undue burden on already overtaxed administrative staff.
The result is the https://presentations.curf.upenn.edu/ website, using Drupal 8 (and upgrading to Drupal 9 soon) and Pantheon's hosting platform. The application allows members of the student body to authenticate with their "PennKey" Single Sign-on, and submit content to specific online events for review by an editorial team.
Combining the Single Sign On infrastructure at The University of Pennsylvania, and using Drupal's robust workflow and editorial review tools, students are able to enter content into a review queue, where editors who are associated with the event they are part of can approve content and publish the content for public or Penn-only viewing. Additionally, customizations of the administrative roles have allowed Penn organizations outside of CURF to host and moderate their own events with only minimal assistance from trained CURF staff.
Over a year past initial deployment, CURF has found success partnering with Alphex to deliver rapid solutions to their critical business needs during a global crisis, as well as planning for reusing the infrastructure to supplement in-person events once the pandemic is past, all while expanding their already comprehensive academic support services to The University of Pennsylvania student body.
A Drupal 9 build to feature the work of a leading advertising and marketing agency in Philadelphia.
Alphex and Weholden have been doing work together for clients for years, and when it came time to update their website, Weholden came to us to build them a flexible and scalable content management system solution that lets their own internal team build and manage content with no technical experience needed.
Using Drupal 9, Alphex built a website that allows for the assembly of rich media assets in a flexible responsive design to feature the agencies work in both still and video content in a large format to best communicate its impact and quality.
Klip Collective
Contracted to rebuild the Klip Collective website, Alphex worked hand in hand with the creative leadership at Klip to design a website that pushed the boundaries of what you might expect to see on the web. While needing to be useful on mobile and tablet for their ongoing sales efforts, we wanted to explore motion and engagement.
Our work led us towards embracing the large library of video they have from their work and putting it in your face immediately.
While many websites will show you a still image, leading you to motion, klip.tv pushes the video to you immediately and puts the interface for exploring the content in a format that makes it easy to explore without even leaving the home page.
American Productivity & Quality Center - Content Management System Strategy, Site Building, Administrator UX Design & Implementation, Project Management, Training and Best Practices consulting.
Alphex was contracted to lead the Drupal front end implementation of the new apqc.org website. Working alongside Southleft and Cashdollar design, Alphex worked as a project management and drupal best practices resource for APQC while implementing a new custom theme and administrative user experience for the revamped www.apqc.org and worked closely with the in-house development team at the American Productivity & Quality Center to integrate a number of internal business systems in to a new Drupal 8 website that leverages external APIs to power vue.js powered interfaces that are built as part of the Drupal site to leverage Drupal's robust content management system, user permission systems and performant caching abilities to present a complex subscription based content repository for APQC's international fortune 500 clients.
Linked by Air -- Drupal Consulting and Training for a ReactJS mobile web app powered by Drupal 8
Alphex Information Solutions was contracted by Linked by Air to assist their efforts in building a revolutionary mobile experience for a major national museum. Linked by Air was tasked by their client to design and develop a revolutionary media-rich cross device mobile experience as a hand held guide for visitors of the museum. Linked by Air was required to use Drupal 8 as the data source for this application and with the help of Alphex Information Solutions was able to build the powerful decoupled application required for the mobile app and for the content management needs of the client. This successfully met the client’s stringent IT requirements for enterprise scale and security coverage while allowing for the flexibility and dynamic interactions of a ReactJS front end application. This project was recently awarded a gold medal as "best app" for the year.
[updated] The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage - Drupal CMS implementation and Theme lift.
This site has recently been re-launched by Alphex - upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 with a full migration of the site's content.
Previous to this site's launch in 2016, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage was locked in a bespoke-custom made content management system that was not architected for expansion and enhancement in anyway that didn't require re-writing huge portions of its code base. The client required a new website that maintained its existing brand, identity & design but gave them far greater control as content managers in managing how their website looks and behaves with out having to know any code. Using a "component library" of designed and developed functional elements, the client is able to drag and drop created content and functionality in to a template using the content management systems web interface and build pages unique to their needs at any time. Alphex Information Solutions also migrated over three thousand individual pieces of content from their old website to the new one.
The Chemical Heritage Foundation
The Chemical Heritage Foundation of Philadelphia Pennsylvania is a museum and archive of the history of chemical science. Alphex Information Solutions entered this engagement to rescue the project from a previous agency exit and ended up redesigning and redeveloping the site from the ground up to finish the project. This project included the migration of over 5000 nodes and the re-architecture of the entire websites functionality around a "component library" that allows the content managers to custom build pages as they see anywhere in the site. The "component library" model ensures that no page on the CHF website is locked in to a template decision made at the time of site design - and is unable to change with out work of a developer in the future. The client's content management team is able to build layouts and pages as they need, when they need, with out knowing any code, to customize their pages to their needs at time of creation.
The Chemical Heritage Foundation - Oral History Project
As part of the larger redesign & rebuild project of https://www.chemheritage.org Alphex Information Solutions also built a mini site for the Oral Histories project at The Chemical Heritage Foundation. The Oral Histories project at The Chemical Heritage Foundation is a series of interviews to capture the living memories of leaders in the chemist community around the planet. Comprised of interview detail pages, capturing tables of content, white papers and abstracts for reading and download, the site also offers purchase and request forms for the full interview. All of this content is indexed in a SOLR search engine for easy search result listing built in to the site. Using SOLR Alphex Information Solutions also built custom facets and search tools to aid the search efforts by the websites audience.
USFCA - Flagship Website
In partnership with Happycog & Fastspot - Alphex was hired by Happycog to provide principal technical leadership in the planning & development of a large scale Drupal 7 website for the University of San Francisco. Over the course of 8 months Alphex distilled the visual & interactive designs provided by Fastspot in to an architectural plan for a complex content management solution that enables 50 content authors and editors, in a proscribed workflow, to manage and expand the content and scope of the usfca.edu website as they see fit. Implementing what we call a Component Library solution in Drupal allows the USFCA web team to assemble pages for any part of the site that are not limited by a set of templates or design decisions made prior to the need of the day. They have at their disposal a collection of tools that meet the design aestehtic to custom deliver content structures and content presentations that meet the communication need, with out being forced to use -or abuse- templates and design limitations that don't meet their business needs. Duran Goodyear, for the team, was responsible for daily project management interactions and project management practice leadership, while coordinating the work of 3 developers and 2 designers over the better half of 2015 to complete this exciting project.
honeygrow
Designed by Jen Denis, Chief Brand Officer of honeygrow, this project is the 2nd iteration of the honeygrow website which required a custom theme for a Drupal 7 website. The process for this allowed us to reuse the Drupal 7 site that was already in place, and build a new theme on top of the existing content scheme, reusing the majority of the work that was already in place. Alterations and additions to the content type scheme and functionality were deployed using Features to make sure the changes deployed to the hosting environment did not break the production website while launching, and greatly streamlining that process. The custom theme integrates a significant amount of custom work to allow for high fidelity scaling background images and html5 videos for a rich descriptive experience... ...coming close to telling you how delicious the food is.
Tavern on the Green
Designed by Nicole Hagedorn in partnership with
KBot Consulting.
With the reopening of Tavern on the Green NYC, there was an opportunity to present a modern design and powerful
technology platform to support the marketing and communication needs of the historically famous restaurant, while
supporting its 21st century needs.
Alphex Information Solutions was selected as the Lead Technology Consultant for this project to assist in the
technical architecture, design production coordination, application development and launch of this website.
Along with a series of secondary systems to support the business on the web, Alphex Information Solutions
continues to provide top-to-bottom support and management of the entire domain.
This site was built using Drupal 7, utilizing the immense flexibility of the platform for the management and
ordering of content in unique ways across the site. The visual design and rich media requirements of the property
required us to select a platform that would allow for ease of use, and ease of theming to meet the unique design
requirements.
With the history of the restaurant and the incredible amount of press that was covering opening day, we hosted
the site with Pantheon. Pantheon is an
enterprise class hosting platform for Drupal, and between the platform choice and the powerful hosting package,
the site was able to support over 200,000 page views in the first 20 days of operation. Impressive conversion
rates were made between people visiting the site, and completing reservations to have a meal at the restaurant
after its opening day. You can read more about the launch success
here.
Template Driven Marketing Websites for a movie studio
http://revengeofthegreendragons.com
http://www.thecaptivemovie.com
http://spectacularnowmovie.com
The production studio for these films contracted Alphex Information Solutions in Partnership with Pixel Parlor to build a series of websites to support the marketing efforts of these films. These sites, built on a Drupal 7 template, allowed for the rapid deployment of marketing websites in response to the fast pace of the industry.
Website links taken down as their registrations have expired or they've been shut down.
Sustainable 19125 & 19134
http://sustainable19125and19134.org
This major redevelopment of an important neighborhood community website was finished in July 2013. The Sustainable 19125 & 19134 website, built on Drupal 7, integrates with Google Maps to allow members of the community to create accounts, log in to the website, and record "Green Actions", that catalog the sustainability and environmental efforts they undertake to help make the New Kensington area of Philadelphia a better place to live. This site was designed, in partnership, by Pixel Parlor - an interactive & print design studio in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia Museum of Arts Craft Show
The first major redesign of the PMA Craft Show Website in 6 years. Alphex Information Solutions was selected by Machinery - a leading marketing & design firm in Philadelphia - to lead the information architecture process, functionality design & eventual development & programming of the new craft show web site.
Cal Ripken, Sr. Foundation Portal
Contracted to construct the members information portal for the Cal Ripken, Sr. Foundation via a 3rd party. Built with Drupal 7 using media embeds from Brightcove. Significant portion of content located behind a members login. Drupal CMS allows the Foundation's staff to easily manage all of the content on the site and embed videos as needed.
Saint Lucifer Spice Shopify Store
Built on Shopify for a small Philadelphia spice creator. Provided code & consulting for the construction of a custom Shopify theme for this store, based on delivered graphic design.
Eddies Rod & Custom Business Website
Built on Drupal 8, this is the site for an award winning auto body and custom car builder in Missouri. The Drupal 8 CMS allows the owners of the shop to upload new content when ever they have a new project, or when ever there's any news they wish to share with the world.
Philadelphia Pet Hotel & Villas
Built on Drupal 6 for the award winning Philadelphia Pet Hotel. The web application features custom functionality to engage existing and potential customers by helping them build a quote for the services they're hoping to find for their pets. The CMS allows the content managers to update prices and types of services offered so that the quote system reflects real prices and avalibility.