Tell us about yourself

Tony Geer: I’m Tony Geer, a Guyanese living in Trinidad. I did my first degree in Computer Science and worked for a few years as a Systems Analyst. I now freelance full time and read part time for my Master of Business Administration degree at the Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business of the University of the West Indies. I’ve been designing and building websites for over six years and have had the pleasure of working with some great clients.

I usually handle all aspects of my web design projects from information architecture to XHTML/CSS - it’s quite rewarding to see a project go from an idea and some pencil sketches to a fully functional website.

What were some of the leading factors that led you to choose ExpressionEngine?

Tony Geer: I had been hearing a lot of great things about ExpressionEngine so I downloaded the Core version to play around with it a bit and was impressed by all the options, control and flexibility. When SFWA asked me to work on the Nebula’s site I knew that ExpressionEngine would be the best candidate to meet all of the requirements without having to jump through hoops.

Did you use any plugins, modules, or other custom modifications to accomplish the site?

Tony Geer: We used the Flickr Tools plugin and the Pages module.

What was your favorite part of building the site?

Tony Geer: My favourite part was setting up the different weblogs and creating and assigning custom field groups to them. Having multiple weblogs has always been the biggest selling point of ExpressionEngine for me. Instead of extending the use of categories and jumping through hoops to publish different types of content in some other publishing tools, we can just create a new weblog. This allows for easier and more streamlined publishing of content that is consistent.

How did you handle the FAQ section of the site?

Tony Geer: We used the Pages module for this section of the site. The module is very easy to use and allowed us to group pages under different virtual folders by simply specifying a path. This way we were able to put the Rules, Awards, FAQs and Committee under the /about path.

For the FAQ page in particular we created a new page, added our content and specified a “default” template that we created. This default template has all of our masthead and footer areas as embeds, and for the column on the left it has the most recent winners of the Nebula Award, also as an embed. We felt that this bit of info should be on almost every page. Using includes allows us to easily update certain sections and have the changes take immediate effect everywhere on the site where the content is included.

How has the community received the new Nebula Awards Site?

Tony Geer: It has been very well received. It has created a central location for information about the awards and a listing of all past winners. Information about winners and both past and present awards ceremonies are also much easier to find. Having interviews with authors about the works that they have won or been nominated for also allows readers to gain a bit more insight into the story behind the story and about the writers themselves. There are also posts by guest authors about general Nebula Awards information and topics of interest to the community.

What future plans do you have for the site?

Tony Geer: We’re planning on greatly expanding and adding to information about past winners including all the nominees for each year, as well as all the details about the past Nebula Awards Weekends.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Tony Geer: Thanks to the kind folks at EllisLab I recently attended ExpressionEngine training with Mike Boyink in Michigan. It was great learning tips and tricks from a very experienced developer and and being able to see how he works. It also showed me some of the cooler stuff that ExpressionEngine is capable of and I’m looking forward to working with it much more in the future.