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.

Student Website
This website was built by one of my students during a class I teach on Responsive Web Design. William was one of the best students I've had in recent years. I'm linking to the website he built in my class, and hosted on our college server, because his design and programming work represents the current state of my knowledge. My current website (the one you are on) is overdue for a makeover. As you can see from Will's website, it is fully responsive, using Media Query style sheets, and a bunch of custom Jquery script that controls the Smartphone button and menu system. I wrote a 200 page book on Responsive Design for my students...which partially explains why my current website is 8 years old.

Creekside Chiropractic & Massage
*No longer current! This placeholder web site, launched November, 2004, and updated in 2010, 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.
UPDATE 2010 I updated this tables based site to an all CSS design in order to optimize it for search engines, and make it more friendly to screen readers.
**Her real current site is here. We parted company in 2013 when she decided to hire a new web design firm.

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.