Websites

Though I’ve been tinkering with web design since the turn of the millennium, it has only been in the last few years that I’ve done anything truly professional for other people. Here are the websites that I’ve helped (in one way or another) to put together.

	Working on a tight schedule (three days), I put together the Connecting Eugene website for a graduate student at the University of Oregon working with a community group to address Willamette Riverfront development. The client wanted a visual impact with the large images, but did not have a budget for a custom theme. So I edited an existing theme to suit the client’s needs. This involved some PHP and CSS tweaking of the original theme.
	Somebody else created the design for this website. What I did was convert it from a table-based layout with no content manager, to a fully W3C-compliant Wordpress-based site. I had a few challenges. I needed to alter some of the plugin CSS and PHP, and I got to write my own custom function in the Wordpress functions.php file. (I really fought to remember the PHP I had learned years ago!) The end product is a minimalist design that is hopefully as easy to navigate as it is easy on the eyes.
	This is a travel blog I put together for a former employer of mine from my Ripple project. He wanted to be able to easily document his family’s world travels. I created a WordPress blog for him using a pre-fashioned WP theme. I also added some back-end plugins so that he could organize his blog entries either in ascending or descending chronological order depending on whether the trip was in-progress or completed.
	The website for the Outdoor Program was originally managed through a low-tech CMS that I wrote myself in PHP simply because I did not have the means at the time to create a dynamic, database-driven site. Fortunately with the assistance of some clever tech folks at the University of Oregon, I was able to set up a database and transfer my hand-made website over to WordPress. The WP back-end made things radically easier for other OP staff members to maintain and update information within the site.
	The first website I was hired to work on was Ripple. It was my task to translate between the client and the web designer. My boss at the time felt that I knew enough about web design to be able to communicate what the non-web-designers wanted in a website. I worked in Expression Engine for this project. It was my first time operating in the context of a themeable CMS. I got a crash course in template variables that would pique my curiosity enough to start experimenting with open-source CMS software such as Joomla and WordPress.

Currently, I work exclusively with WordPress. My own website here uses WordPress as its CMS. I really like the simplicity of WordPress. Yet it has great potential for handling much larger websites thanks in part to an extensive repository of user-generated themes, plugins, and help files.

I’m hoping to expand my experience in WordPress website development. If you are interested in creating a WordPress-driven website but don’t know where to begin, please feel free to contact me. As I’m just getting started in the industry, I have very reasonable rates.