The mantra of “work smart, not hard” was my motto for this project.

I was approached by a childhood friend named Brandon this past summer to help his company integrate the CMS for the new Fiesta Bowl website. The Fiesta Bowl had hired out an ad agency to design their website who in turn hired Red Pear, who then hired me. I was a tad bit down the line when it came to decisions, but I was the workforce behind the actual site concepts becoming real css and html.

Prior to this site I had no knowledge whatsoever of Expression Engine other than the fact I liked what I saw on the website. I had been involved in a few other CMS integrations with prior projects, but for the most part I was a noob when it came to this sort of stuff. Naturally, I told Brandon that I could do it… Sometimes you gotta stretch yourself and I knew this project was a great opportunity for that. I also knew that it would be a great name to have in portfolio. Little did I know that this would become the biggest project of my life in more ways than I had imagined.

The project took somewhere in the ball park of 150+ hours to complete. And I did a majority of the CSS and html for the site. I was able to build a custom breadcrumb that was driven through Expression Engine template variables. I also used the embedded template feature heavily and it made my life easy. There were quite a few obstacles that I was able to meet through so many of EE’s built in capabilities… we were even able to offer basic IE6 support. All in all there were about 15 unique sites and I would guess around 100+ unique pages that were built in around a month. Expression Engine definitely made this project possible and easily increased the build time by at least half.