Portfolio

The Big Black Pencil redesign project was a close collaboration with the site owner, who wanted a dramatically new look for his site. I helped him pick out a professionally designed theme that met this site’s particular needs, installed and configured some plugins, and then fixed a few bugs in the theme and otherwise bent it to his will. Images were edited, page hierarchies were created, and within seven days the new look was up and running.

The Saint Joseph’s University project was one of those gigs where you’re asked to perform a seemingly simple task but keep finding more and more that needs to be done. In this case, the designer just wanted to change the navigation. I ended up cleaning up a good deal of the code, making the site more modular, fixing some broken links, etc… All in a day’s work, and the site will be better for it.

The Sacred Heart University site was the most challenging design I’ve worked with to date, due to a large textured background and free rein to select and implement a JavaScript slide show. The site uses optimized images, minified files, and other tweaks, but I’m still not satisfied with the page load performance. On the other hand, the layout faithfully reproduces the designer’s PSDs, from the the partially transparent touts down to the navigation on the jQuery slide show.

Anna Maria College was the first site that I developed since installing the Page Speed Firebug plugin, and I have made it a point since to really improve on page load times. The site uses optimized images, a single minified JavaScript, and a single CSS file 165 total rules. I’ve also paid greater attention to the order of my includes so as to not restrict parallelization, described in more detail in this video about properly including style sheets and scripts. As such, I’m pretty pleased with its performance.

This site was also the first one I developed for designer Kevin Zeph.

Lewis University needed a new site to highlight three online Master’s degree programs. The most interesting part of this project, developmentally, was a Flash-like slide show thing that actually uses script.aculo.us’ Effect.Move. It’s so smooth and graceful that the designer and I just kept referring to it as ‘the Flash thing’ to keep it simple. Script.aculo.us’ Effect.Blind is used elsewhere to shorten longer pages, keeping them easily scannable (is that a word yet?), yet displaying more detailed information with a click.

Specialty Inspections offers home, termite, roof, chimney, and pool inspections, and needed a web site with an online inspection order form and payment system. I used a MooTools accordion to reduce a rather intimidating, 60+ field order form into three approachable steps with a real-time cost calculator. This was a very enjoyable project, thanks to an excellent point person at Specialty Inspections.

This is an excellent example of a typical small-business site. It’s small, only four pages, but it’s easily navigable and has useful content on each page. At the time, this site used z-index more extensively than any other.

TABU Tackle is a new fishing lure company owned an operated by a group of professional anglers. I was tasked to develop a web site that would fit thematically with product packaging and advertising elements already in place. TABU also needed something that could be updated easily by five different guys, so naturally I chose to install WordPress and create a custom theme.

Michael Murphy asked me to update his site from one that was fully Flash to one that was search engine friendly. Within a few weeks, we started seeing dramatic improvements within the search engines’ rankings. The site uses a pretty clever trick to force IE versions < 7 to show transparent .png files, too.

Life At Sea is a band, but I was asked to design a site that wouldn’t be overly “bandy.” I tried to play with the lonely isolation of the name and chose a black-and-white photobook look, as though one was looking back at a lifetime of solitary moments. Sadly, solo projects, families, careers, and one relocation from Chicago to Atlanta took their toll and the band, and the site, are on indefinite hiatus.

Brian Morgan makes wicked, captivating art using black humor to point out social injustices. I followed his input on artistic direction and gave him a black and bull’s blood red backdrop to showcase his paintings and illustrations.