For the past couple months, on and off, I've been working at creating new websites for Jim's characters. The newest ones are jkbenton.com, where you can buy his original artwork, kissydoodles.com / meanydoodles.com, which has been designed but is not yet live since the products do not yet exist, and bentonbooks.com, a place for all of his book properties (as opposed to apparel/novelty properties, which is blackjackinc.com).

While this collection of sites is no CSS Zen Garden, I am a little proud of the different looks I have been able to achieve while working within the restrictions of the Monster Commerce platform. In particular, kissydoodles/meanydoodles was interesting because some JavaScript on each page changes the images and the background. I was going for a "multiple personality" feel for the site. You have the cutesy kissydoodles, and the red-and-black meanydoodles (which was, if you can't tell, created especially for Hot Topic). Who knows if anything will ever come of the doodles -- Jim has a strategy for his properties and he likes to have each property developed with its own website so that if a major customer bites, then we are ready to go with the online retail.

Static pages were an option but become a nightmare to maintain as I found out about a year ago when I tried to have a few static pages on blackjackinc.com. Dynamic solutions such as my own ASP code or PHP were not possible on this platform. The "turn-key" shopping carts such as MC are pretty restrictive, mostly for security reasons. The alternative, open source, is not yet at production quality. Yes yes I know that lots of sites use oscommerce and zencart and whatever but try to get a good looking, original site on one of those platforms. I challenge anyone to find me a good looking ecommerce site built on oscommerce. "Generic" might be good for usability but it is terrible for branding.

There are also three older sites which you can use as comparison to see how I have improved: WatashiBaka.com, ShopFranny.com, and buttbrain.com.