Exotica Expo Detroit
www.exoticadetroit.com

Exotica Expo Detroit is a huge convention and fashion event that takes place several times per year in Detroit, with typical attendance of over 10,000 people.

The web site that Jeff designed and built for Exotica reflects the event's modern, hip, "fashion-forward" nature, and includes a tremendous number of custom features that the client desired, which propel it well beyond the realm of a typical "information only" web site. The site includes tight ecommerce integration to allow online purchase of event tickets, as well as a tremendous amount of highly dynamic and ever-changing content, all fully manageable by the client. In addition to the site itself, Jeff also helped the client create a link exchange program and designed a sleek looking web banner for the client for that purpose.

Technology: The site was developed in PHP and incorporates extensive MySQL based back-end features. Jeff made extensive use of DHTML tab based content layout, allowing a tremendous amount of content to be presented to the visitor in a clean, non-confusing format. The site includes an interactive photo gallery which was coded completely from scratch for the client, which allows photos to be sorted and categorized by event day and photographer. There is also an interactive "Who's Who" section of the site, showcasing key people and celebrities involved with the event, as well as a full-featured discussion forum for use by the site's visitors and the event's staff, and a news section. All of the above are driven by the MySQL database back end, and fully manageable by the client using a content management system (CMS) that was developed from scratch to meet the client's specific needs. The photo gallery and Who's Who modules of the content management system not only allow the client to post photos, but even automatically resizes and crops the photographs for the client, thus providing an extremely easy to self-manage web site.