Getting Started
So I started building web pages my first year at Michigan State for a class to showcase a "web portfolio," and as you can see I did not stop there. My last year at State aced a web design class, and found myself building a complex portfolio built on Expression Engine, now featured on their Core Featured gallery.
Thinking of Building a Website?
Of course I can help! I specialize in creating XHTML and CSS sites with a light touch of fancy javascript here and there and avoid Flash technology. I have low hourly and project rates as I try and build a larger portfolio.
Projects and Thoughts
Part of staying ontop of the web is continuing to find and create projects. I now have a page dedicated for this!
Examples
- RecordingVitale
- St Luke Lutheran Church
- Brenden Gunnell Redesign
- Between the Lines Psychological Services
- Waverly High School Christmas Concert
- Don Giovanni
- Recording Services
- Youth Group Summer Flyer
- MSU Symphony Concert DVD
RecordingVitale
Recording Vitale
A Personal Project, community-based website for recording engineers to post their work online.
In the original proposal I really wanted to make an audio site that didn’t suck, or look terrible. Most sites I’ve seen are bland, and unorganized, or otherwise need to be updated in their design system (aka, the Microsoft Frontpage effect). You can’t blame engineers for learning a bit of code and making their own in the spirit of a hobby or saving cash; they simply have another profession that isn’t web design.
That’s where I hope to help. Tired of bloated forums and information behind logins I donated some time to make a site that could open things a up a bit. There are hundreds of CSS galleries for web design, why not make one for recording?
The Expression Engine templates are thick. Each contains a healthy amount of conditionals, tags and custom queries to make me go cross-eyed, and I wrote it! I spent several days on each template, packing in as much functionality and customizations as possible.
Making the viewing-side of the site was easy. It’s a mirror of my own portfolio in theory. However the one obstacle I still am not satisfied with is the way users post entries. Expression Engine’s stand-alone entry form and subsequent plugins didn’t do the job well enough, so I reverted to a “hack” utilizing the control panel.
I began this project in September of 2007 with about 3 months of on-off work. After being told the Audio Engineering Society was making their own version and available funding was being put towards that project I went solo. I contacted about a dozen designers who quoted me at outrageous prices or were terrible at replying to emails ~cough Mark Bolton cough~. In the end, I’m glad I went this route, because making a site like this taught me a lot about what I can do and saved a lot of money.
Also See: [No Related Recordings] [No Related Pages]
