Portfolio
Below is a sampling of the sites I've worked on. They're grouped by roughly what my contribution was.
Wordpress
Carol's Cuties
Carol Whelan creates hand-made dolls and is a member of the International Art Doll Registry. She sells her dolls on Etsy and at craft fairs, but when she told people how to find her, she found they had trouble finding her Etsy page. She wanted a domain name that everyone could remember and a way to tell her customer base about her upcoming shows.
Carol is technically literate enough to have established an Etsy store with no trouble, but she doesn't take joy in technology, it's a means to an end. I wanted to provide her with a content management system so she could update her own content, but one with a low-learning curve. I installed Wordpress and Custom Etsy Widget, a Wordpress plugin to show an Etsy user's latest products. I customized the theme a bit to show the dolls in the header rather than the sidebar, put in some requisite data, and was ready to turn it live. I made an appointment with Carol to show her how to use it and answer any questions she might have. In less than an hour, she was up and running, feeling confident in using her new site.
Back-end developed from comps
These are sites where a designer created the design in Photoshop and passed the file along to me to turn into a working web site.
Kretschmar Training
Kretschmar was, at the time, the most challenging site I had ever worked on. We knew it was going to be some kind of quiz site, but we didn't know the details. It was hard to wrap my mind around building an application with such little direction.
Eventually I created a web site with 4 types of users, including admins, sales reps, deli managers and deli employees. Deli employees were tasked with reading the training materials and passing a quiz afterward. The managers were in charge of making sure their employees were able to keep tabs on their employees' progress.
The quizzes were challenging because we had several different types of questions: true/false, multiple choice and matching. The latter two were shuffled every time the page reloaded. If a user failed the test, they could retake it as many times as needed.
The actual training materials came in the form of pages after pages of Word documents, so there was also a bit of a data-entry element.
Christenson Electric
Christenson Electric is known in Portland for their attention-getting red vans. Their web site needs were simple: just a few static pages. I installed MODx so that the customer could updated it, and themed MODx to fit the design.
Best supporting programmer using Zend
Most of these sites are based on the Zend framework. I was helping out the lead programmer on all these sites, but it helped expose me to Zend and the wonderful world of the MVC model and PHP frameworks.
My Lineage
The designer had created all the design and HTML files, and the other developer had installed Zend, the only real challange for me was becoming somewhat literate in the MVC framework, an investment that has paid off big dividends.
Puppy Match 4 You
As in with My Lineage, my role here was minimal. It would not be portfolio-worthy except that it involves puppies.
Co-developer
While employed at Tech4Learning, I worked on both their online products. There were two web developers, and we split the work about evenly. When I was hired, Wixie just needed finishing touches. It went live three months later. The other developer and I continued to add features and address bugs as they came up.
Wixie
This is Tech4Learning's premiere online learning software. It's the online companion to Pixie.
We paid a visit to a classroom of second and third graders who got to beta test an almost-perfect version of Wixie. When the teacher told them the could continue working on their projects at home, the class was elated. After the students had left, one of the other developers pointed out that this class full of 7-year-olds was thrilled about getting homework. I think that's the highest compliment educational software can get.
K12Share
K12Share works with Share to allow students to publish files created in Share to the internet.
We were able to develop K12Share much more quickly based on many lessons we learned while working on Wixie. The other developer - who'd worked on Wixie from its inception - took over primary responsibility for developing K12Share while I was temporarily the only Wixie developer. Once K12Share stabilized, we again shared responsibility for both sites.
For fun
These are all sites I worked on exclusively. I'm more programmer than designer, so please forgive any design faux pas. My skill and passion lie in the programming
VeganWiki
I made this site using MediaWiki to keep tabs on what foods and ingredients are vegan. In addition to data entry, I some minor theming and cosmetic hacks.
Wordpress plugin: Random Blogroll Category
A simple plugin to select a random blogroll category. Read more
