Here are some of the websites I've developed. Most are my own graphic design work;
a couple were designed by the luminaries at Bidwell ID back East.
Boise Contemporary TheaterA souped up Wordpress site with extra data tables touches of jQuery. Design by Amy Granger |
TimeGliderFlash-based application for creating interactive timelines, used by over 30,000 teachers, students, and professionals. |
Idaho Humanities CouncilCMS with added data-driven front and back end tools for navigating and managing IHC's Speakers Bureau |
Ian Boyden StudiosCMS with added front and back end tools for various types of art and simple daily musings. |
Carla Caruso Jewelryan "ajaxy" Zen Cart married to the the HandEye CMS. |
Stave PuzzlesA wicked complex e-commerce site integrated with HandEye CMS, interactive games, and gobs of back-end management tools. |
Gunilla Norris, authora quiet, contemplative site. Each book-feature page has an audio excerpt |
Mulvaney Medical Office BuildingA "classic" static website designed from scratch |
Emily Rosenfelda very simple, hand-crafted e-commerce site using ZenCart |
Mirror MoviesA Flash-based site with animated navigation and partial XML-driven content |
Mass HumanitiesDesigned by Bidwell ID for the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, using HandEye CMS with customized backend data management tools |
ITD Amherstdesigned by Bidwell ID, using HandEye CMS and a CMS component for featured artists |
The O-TonesA re-adaptation of a previously static/photo-based site, greatly enhanced by the HandEye CMS. |
My background as a designer and craftsperson as well as ten years experience as a programmer gives me a full set of tools for web development for a small- to medium-sized company. I also have an MFA in creative writing and extensive copy-editing experience. You can read more about me here.
Here are the basics of what I do as a web developer:
I was born in 1968 and grew up in Norwich, Vermont. My family was a little ahead of the curve with computers: I remember, in the early '80s, using my dad's Radio Shack TRS-80 and writing a Basic program to move an asterisk around the screen with the keyboard. Our elementary school had a terminal connected to Dartmouth College (where Basic was invented), and we used to spend time in the terminal room (a converted closet) and chat with others on a network using an ancient UNIX application called "joi xyz": really just a slew of inanities being buzz-printed onto a continuous feed — a clear percursor to instant messaging.
In college I was a sculpture major at Wesleyan University and threw pots, painted, and such. Afterward, for about 10 years I lived in Northampton, Massachusetts where I morphed slowly from being a sculptor and furniture maker into being a designer and bookbinder. I love graphic design but web design, capable of interaction — and quick correction — was appealing. In 1999 I dove into Flash, PHP and MySQL, and it felt like I had come back to something familiar. Web design is oddly a lot like furniture making: it involves physical interaction and usage, requires structural integrity, and is best when it is simple.
I live in Boise, Idaho with my wife Harriett, our kid Simon, a cat named Buster and two frogs: Pab and Pab.
All web sites should be considered "applications" because they they revolve around user interaction. I try to emphasize the possible and desired actions of users over a typical "information architecture". This emphasizes "doing" over "knowing". What do you want people to do on your site? What will they want to do?
My projects are often composed with PHP interacting with a MySQL database and I frequenly make use of libraries and frameworks, like JQuery for Javascript or CodeIgniter for PHP, to make sites more managable or richly interactive.
I rarely make a website that is not based on a content management system (CMS) framework. This is a two-sided interface: one side for users (public) and the other side for the owner/administrator of the site. I've created a "bare bones" CMS framework having been disappointed in the PHP CMS workhorses available: Drupal, Mambo, and others. The HandEye CMS uses precious little code, is easy manage, and integrates easily with other components.
In addition to "pages," sites often need complex database-driven resources. The Idaho Humanities Council needed a complex system for exploring their Speakers Bureau. Each speaker has a biography, an image, a catalog of presentations, and links to books they've authored. I built an interface that allows visitors to search and browse a Speakers catalog, and a back-end suite of tools that controls all the content.
I'm especially proud of TimeGlider, a web-based timeline authoring application I built in Flash, PHP, and MySQL: It's currently being used by thousands of teachers, students, and professionals to plan and explore history.
