DetroitYES
DetroitYES! was initially launched by my father, Lowell Boileau in 1997 as The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, which was a thoughtfully written tour through the city's abandon industrial areas, and the residential fallout that followed. Following a flood of sentimental emails from Detroiter's both locally and abroad who were moved by the story, he launched the DetroitYES! Discussion boards in February of 1999. Since then, the site has garnered a reputation for being the best online discussion about Detroit, and has received numerous awards and accolades from various sources.
I entered the scene in 2009 after graduating from Wayne State. Around this time Lowell had switched forum software's from a decaying DiscussWare install into vBulletin 3.8. Appalled by his use of iframes to style the site, I dove into the vBulletin templating system to develop a better looking and more efficient alternative, and thereafter became increasingly familiar with the vBulletin framework.
In early 2012, I was responsible for the redevelopment of the home page, building and introducing a unique product for vBulletin that aggregates 'headline threads' into a newspaper style layout that orders threads by popularity rather than which has the most recent activity. This in esscence allows the community to indirectly determine the most important topics via an algorhythm of our own design. With this launch, I also designed and introduced a new design for the site, as well as vBulletin's built in mobile support (the Headline Thread page was also built to support mobile). Being an in-house publication of my company AtDetroit, we do not always have time to devote to DetroitYES. However, next on the agenda is to update the original Fabulous Ruins tour with a fresh design, and new photos and content where applicable.
Couples Resorts
AtDetroit was responsible for Couples' initial web presence, launched in 1997. In 2010 we implemented a new design, via a PHP templating engine that I hand built for the project. After considering the various templating engines and CMS's on the market, such as, but not limited to Smarty, Wordpress, and Drupal, the decision was made to go home brew as, the 'vialble' options just weren't flexible enough to stomach the transition in a timely and cost effective manner.
As intended, the framework has stomached the requests of the clients without compromising its integrity. Most notably are several header redesigns, as well as the addition of the Couples Barbados resort. In September 2011, we launched the Couples Mobile site, an addition I had prepared for when building the templating engine. To date, Couples is the only major Carribbean player with a mobile presence.
In early 2013 we went live with our industry leading rates calendar, which simplifies both the management/changing, and browsing of available rates on the website, and feeds users into a very flexible booking gateway that I also programmed.
Other tasks include moderating, managing, and writing custom vBulletin plugin products for the Couples Message Board, aiding in template creation and sends for email marketing campagins and general consluting.
DJtrax.us
I started DjTraxus in June of 2011 to keep myself up to date with Wordpress Theme and Plugin development, as well as to provide an outlet for my interests in electronic music and its surrounding universes. I forward developed the theme, expecting to push the limits of browsers and bandwidth using large images and heavy implementation of CSS3. Given the user demographics of many of my other projects, it is rare that I get to use the newest technology as it will cause accessibility issues, so this was a fun excursion.
At the moment, it is currently a tech blog where I aggregate inspiration as well as showcase some of my Music/Visual related projects that result. Most recently, it hosts the development status updates as well as the automatic distribution for my Traxus Scratch Live, a Lemur template I developed that allows you to control Serato Scratch Live from an Ipad.