Portfolio

Skills: XHTML, HTML, CSS, Photoshop, cross browser compliance, standards compliance, web standards, search engine optimization (SEO)

Most portfolio pages are full of marketing speech and the like that looks professional and nice, but is mainly boring and uninteresting. I’ve tried to craft my portfolio descriptions to be a little more personal including things I learned on the projects and things I would do differently or change if given the opportunity again today. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I didn’t do my best work at the time only that through time and experience we pick up new skills, ideas, and insights. Any designer/developer that can look at a design or site more than six months old and honestly tell themselves they wouldn’t change a thing is probably lying to themselves. Growth and development – of our skills, knowledge, design practices, and tools available – is an important part of the web and, more importantly, building sites for the web.

Listings go from most recent to least.

Freelance

My Design Element

Again worked with my designer friend Devin (mydesignelement.com) this time on his personal portfolio site. Crafted his flat into a Wordpress theme built on my personal theme framework that was usable, cross browser compliant, and search engine optimized. Also adapted the framework to support two standalone pages based upon his design – the home page and contact page.

Things I learned: Although Wordpress allows you – via naming convention – to support an alternative homepage easily I was not able to find, via search, an easy way to do other pages while including elements from “the loop” – which enables you to include variables (in case copy or other elements like navigation change the end user won’t have to update these manually – they’ll just work). I was finally able to find a site that laid a very basic framework of how to do this and adapted that to add to the theme the standalone contact page that could be edited via the Appearance editor in the admin section of Wordpress. I unfortunately was not able to figure out how to get it to accept the url phrasing I wanted – so the url for this particular page is not ideal. I realize this can be done via server redirects, etc, but ideally it would be nice to simply have it work right out of the box.

Grinding Tapes Blog

A friend of mine had a nicely designed site built upon a custom CMS. He wanted to add a blog built upon the Wordpress framework since he has used it for other projects and liked the features and functionality. I used my personal theme framework and meshed it with his main CSS file along with a few modifications to allow him to blend the blog in seamlessly with his site.

Things I learned: Modifying a theme to include the styles of an existing site as well as the navigation elements in order to create a seamless experience. New ways to use Wordpress to add on functionality to an already existing site.

six9chevelle

Worked with a designer friend of mine Devin (mydesignelement.com) to turn his flat into a Wordpress theme for his client’s site that was usable, cross browser compliant, and search engine optimized. Built on the Wordpress platform because it’s easily adaptable and simple to use.

Things I learned: It was interesting adapting the large branding image into the design. This was also the first real standalone theme I had done. I had used a Wordpress theme on my own site (pre 2.0 variant) but it was basically a CSS file thrown onto a theme template. For this project I used a framework I had been building for my own site and adapted it slightly to the needs of the client.

Bogey Web Design

Designed my personal site from the ground up. My current 2.0 variant blends web 2.0 elements, search engine optimization, and readability into a clean, colorful, and pleasing design.

Things I learned: Using Wordpress I learned how to build a theme from the ground up. I’ve since used the theme as a framework for other projects including client’s sites and open source contributions.

Fornataro Architecture

Worked with projectskyline.com to turn their design flats into usable, cross browser compliant, and search engine optimized front end code. Worked with them to adapt my front end code to work with their custom content management system.

Things I learned: The gallery page (fornataroarchitecture.com/gallery.html) while having nice functionality is not as easily updatable as I’d like. I would have preferred to work with an open source CMS (like Wordpress) which would have enabled me to use, adapt, or build a plugin to better manage that section to allow for easy future upgrades.

Champion Taxi

One of the first sites I did. Champion’s owners wanted a complete from the ground up design. Starting with only the original logo and red, white and blue patriotic color scheme I redesigned the logo (which is now used on their cars and materials) and went through several iterations of design before they settled upon a variant of my own 2.0 web site design (now released as a free theme) with their color scheme and original, patriotic buttons and images I produced.

The owners wanted a very simple, basic, and easily updated site. I delivered a site with high readability, strong SEO architecture, bright colors, and simple blend of web 2.0 design elements for flair. Although a rather simplistic design by first glance this is exactly what the owners wanted – something that was a simple, easily maintainable brochure site to augment their other branding and advertising messages.

Things I learned: If I had it to do over again, I’d make the design a little less plain. I’d also convert it into a theme and put the content into a Wordpress install to allow the client to easily update the content whenever necessary. At the time of creation, it was just not an option.

Professional

Helium (2007-present)

As a UI developer for Helium I was solely responsible for the User Interface (UI) of the site. The domain only included Helium.com however internally there were multiple development environments. The main application was written in Ruby on Rails. Several servers were Ruby on Mack. The community boards were SMF which we updated the UI on to more closely resemble the main site. Worked on a Mac using Subversion and then Git as version control systems.

My main responsibilities included helping design flats, working with the graphic designer to provide input on flats (usability, scale, complexity), cross browser compliance (IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari), working with business to craft search engine optimization (SE0) standards and practices, working with business to craft specifications for future features, and working with the community via the community boards and Wordpress blog to educate users (on site usage, SEO, features, messaging).

Employment Guide (2006: employmentguide.com, careerweb.com, healthcareerweb.com, careersingear.com, jobalot.com, parenthood.com)

As an HTML Programmer for Dominion Enterprises (dominionenterprises.com. At the time of employment, Trader Publishing) I was solely responsible for the User Interface (UI) of all main employment sites – specifically employmentguide.com but also it’s sister sites careerweb.com, healthcareerweb.com, and careersingear.com. I also helped on the UI for jobalot.com and parenthood.com at various times. All have been updated since I’ve left so little or none of my UI code exists on the live servers. Mainly I worked on a PC in ColdFusion environment with no version control. As I was leaving they were moving to a PHP environment. Parenthood and jobalot were both in PHP when I worked on them.

My responsibilities were to update the existing code to be more standards compliant, cleaner, leaner, and optimized for search engines (SEO), cross browser compliance (IE6, Firefox), working with the graphic designer on future design flats, and converting those flats into usable, compliant and search engine optimized front end code once approved.

Wordpress Themes

I use, recommend and develop for the Wordpress platform. You can view my themes on my Wordpress themes page.

Older Stuff

Here are some of my older contributions. I consider all open source (design wise, not content). Please don’t claim original ownership but other than that you may reuse and modify with no restraint. A link back to my site is preferable but not required.

CSS U.S. Map

At Employment Guide at one point we were having an issue with page load speeds. On the home page we had a very large Flash map of the U.S. with each state linking to the jobs for that particular state. Even after several iterations of optimization it was still the largest element (page weight relative) on the home page. Since this was functionality they didn’t want to remove, in my spare time I drafted a CSS U.S. map that we could use instead. It’s not perfect – there are some areas where the right state is a little off – however it’s interesting. It was never used by EG so I posted it here.

No comments yet, be the first!