A Lowell, MA based, web standards compliant, CSS & XHTML web designer’s site

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.

Freelance

Ordered with most recent first.

• Beaver Wood Energy
• Ledoux Landscaping
• My Design Element
• Grinding Tapes Blog
• Six9Chevelle
• Fornataro Architecture
• Champion Taxi

WordPress Themes

• Bwd 1
• Bwd 2
• Bwd 3

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.

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