Your guide to the perilous waters of the internet

Clients - Web Sites and Interfaces I've built - freelance

For businesses, both large and small, a Web Site is THE most cost effective way to communicate with your customers. For the price of printing one 4 color brochure, or running a 3 inch advertisement in the yellow pages of your phone book for several months, you can have an entire web site custom built with pages and pages of text and full color pictures of the services and products you offer to your customers.

This is not to say that you no longer need to spend dollars on a broad range of advertising venues, which would include the yellow pages, print advertising and possibly even radio and TV ads, depending on the size of your business. The Internet is simply another means for you to reach out to your customer. Dollar for dollar, for the amount of content you can put in front of your customer, the Internet can't be beat.

Interface Design

A well designed interface is a pleasure to behold. It flows reliably across all browsers, operating platforms (even the Mac) and screen resolutions. Interfaces have to straddle the fence between creativity and functionality.

I design interfaces that will accommodate the limitations of the popular browsers and degrade gracefully in older browsers. Without a comprehensive understanding of browser abilities, it's all too easy to create a charming interface in Photoshop that will have severe functionality issues when it is sliced into html.

When I design an interface for a client, I first gather information about the clients business, then ask the client if he has any particular preferences for the style of interface he prefers. Usually we sit down and look at the web sites of some of his competitors. My goal as an interface designer is to make my clients web site interface a unique piece of digital art that reflects the core values of his business without getting lost in "geewhiz" special effects.

These interface designs typically involve a lot of give and take between me and the client and go through a series of stages. I build an initial interface, present it to the client and then refine it based on feedback. Here are a couple examples: 1. Creekside; 2. Rainier Communications Commission

These are the web sites I have created as a Freelance Web Designer. Beside each thumbnail, I have listed my involvement with the site.

Human Resources, Clover Park Technical College
This web site, launched Spring, 2008, was built by Susan Bushey who took a 30 hour night class I teach to the faculty at www.cptc.edu. Though she had never built a web site before, over the course of the 30 hour class she learned how to use my pre-designed template. I consulted with her occasionally over the next couple months as she added content and came up against new challenges, but the site is a great example of how non designers can, with a little help, build a very effective web site.

Rainier Media Corporation
This web site, launched Spring, 2005, was built for a client whose former web site was showing signs of age. As a government agency providing cable tv coverage for the entire county, they were interested in presenting a more modern image to their customer base. The client had some in house Photoshop ability and provided me with the banner image. I started with their banner image and built the interface structure below the banner which includes the navigation tabs, the dhtml JavaScript dropdown menus and all the XHTML. After the site was built I provided several hours of on-location tutoring with the client to give them the skills necessary to update their site using Dreamweaver.

Creekside Chiropractic & Massage
This web site, launched November, 2004, was built for a client who wanted to take her marketing efforts to the next level. She has a long established clinic but had been relying on traditional advertising to reach her patients. I built a site for her that enables her to reach a far larger audience than she had been reaching in the past. The highlights of this site are the interface, which, with it's cascading structure, echo's the creek behind her office, and the "patient forms" page which allows patients to print out high quality office forms from the site. Patients fill them out in the comfort of their own homes, thereby saving time in the office.

Clover Park Technical College
*This was my largest project to date, and was live from September 20, 2002 until August, 2004. The client was several years overdue for a facelift on an existing site and asked me if I would like to take on the project. They needed the new site desperately, but were working with a limited budget. I put together a proposal that used my design and code writing skills for the initial design work. For the actual production work I supervised a team of handpicked graduates of the Web Design Program (my former students). We were able to convert all 200 pages of the existing site over to my new interface in three weeks, on schedule and on budget.
Note: Client recently (9-04) launched a new site built by communicreations.com. They needed to have a large back end written in ASP which enables the client to do their own maintenance.

Dr. Gregory Fisher DDS
This web site, launched June, 2003, was built entirely from scratch. The client provided me with the technical dental slides, but everything else was created either with my digital camera or in Photoshop. He had initially planned on providing his own copy. However, this proved difficult to do.
We found a solution wherein I did a taped in-office interview, transcribed the spoken interview to Word, and then over the course of several weeks, through a collaboration between the client, myself and my father (a retired newspaper editor), we were able to provide high quality copy that effectively communicated his approach to the art of Dentistry.

Memos, Etc.
The client had built a weekly newsletter for print using Microsoft Publisher. They were trying to make the transition from print to web, but had been struggling with the "save as web page" abilities of Microsoft Word and Publisher.
This was the college's official newsletter, and the design (created by an in-house writer in Publisher) had been signed off on by her boss so it had have the "approved look" both online, and when the end user pressed the print button on the browser. In addition, the editor of the newsletter needed to be able to write and publish the ezine each week without knowing html code.
Using Dreamweaver's template function, I created a "non-breakable" web page that very closely resembled the officially approved Microsoft Publisher document. I tutored the newsletter editor in Dreamweaver until she was able to reliably publish her newsletter online each week with minimal to no assistance. Launched January, 2003.
NOTE: The college has changed over to a new site built by an outside firm, but the Memos web page can still be found at the link above.

Full time Web Work

Featured below are some of the web sites I worked on during my year (2001 - 2002) as a Web Developer with Artifexbid.com. Beside each thumbnail, I have listed my involvement with the site. Although we worked in a team environment at Artifex, and there was some cross training, each of us was recognized for our special abilities. My specialties were, in order of importance:

• my listening and communication skills, combined with a careful eye for details
• converting customer Word documents to html
• creating CSS files
• writing and editing low end Javascript
• uploading and testing changes to large existing web sites
• scanning and editing images in Photoshop
• creating and slicing interfaces in Photoshop/Imageready
• testing developing applications from our programming department, comparing to 'Scope of Work' documents
• create small animated gif's and Flash movies
• taking digital photographs

This web site went through several complete revisions during it's development and has continued to evolve over the last 4 years. The only thing I did not touch on this site was the Flash intro and the high end Javascript that controls the position of the drop downs in different browsers and screen resolutions. I was the first in the shop to figure out and apply Dreamweaver's Library function to a web site. As the customer repeatedly changed the text in the drop down navigation gif's, I found the Library function to be a substantial time-saver. A much better solution would have been server side includes as I use on this web site, but at that time I had not yet learned a programming language.

I was involved with this one from start to finish (excluding the Flash intro). Getting the wrap around interface to function took a marathon team effort of which I was proud to be a part. I was heavily involved with the Photoshop, slicing, html, and rollover button work. The photos were magnificent and a pleasure to work on.

apollorca.com
My involvement with this site is similar to the site above. I was also one of several people responsible for updating the site as time went on. It has changed substantially in the 4 years since I worked on it.

avuedigitalservices.com
This site allows job seekers to apply online with the United States Forest Service. I have worked all over this huge password protected site. From making the animated gif's to editing the html elements on the JSP pages to adding ADA compliance tags for blind users, I've been there, done that and bought the tee shirt.
I was also involved with a big push to make the site accessible to Palm users and developed a 60 page demonstration site viewable on a Visor. Because artifexbid.com hired me primarily to work on this clients web site, after the client brought the web work in-house, it was only a short time until I was laid off and began a career in teaching and freelancing.