When a client wants a clean simple site, that does not mean less work. The pressure is on to create a subtle site of precision and quality. In this piece, it is the little details that add the sophistication.
For two years I managed this site from the hours of 9-6. Like many big companies, they were hesitant to change what was working. But change the site we did.
I recreated 50 pages of content one-at-a-time when I created the site for the Chicago Alumni Chapter of Delta Sigma Pi co-ed professional fraternity. Updating an old site can be challenging, especially when the content has decades of history within it. And you can be sure that the finance and accounting people will audit your success for mistakes! Project Summary: There was a lot of planning that went into the creation of such a little site. The site itself did not take much work. Sometimes, the real challenge is uncovering the existing processes, convincing the managers you can improve their processes, and keeping the volunteers motivated to help. See the site: www.chicagodsp.org Project Details: At the Core – Scholarships and Events: After reviewing what was important to the group, two things came to the top of the list. One was keeping records of award winners. The organization sponsored several initiatives to support young professionals in school. The second thing was events. The organization hosts professional and community service events to support its members and the community. So it was obvious what the site needed: event tracking and pictures. Lots of pictures. A Site Powered By Other Sites: Like many things in this generation of the web, information feeds and developer APIs have allowed the web to interlink in ways never thought possible on this site. For images, I knew there was one major player in the industry in 2010 – Flickr. So I created an account for them. In the future, they can create a group where people add pictures to the site through a community, with the site admins only filtering the results of the best to the top. For events, I had to sit down and talk about processing fees and margins and ticket distributions with the VP of Activities and VP of Finance. All events this organization threw required a lot of website coding to set up ticketing. And even then, they admitted there were several mistakes. Customers had to fill out offline forms after purchase, occasionally had to be reimbursed money, and sometimes did not have an online ticket location at all. So I spent several hours setting up the CAC with my favorite new company, EventBrite. EventBrite is an event planning service that offers more features for a smaller margin than most others I have looked at. We were able to quickly integrate with Facebook, print tickets, offer checkout with multiple payment options, set up early bird tickets, and easily create the entries into their website without hard-coding...
The Seraph Technology Solutions site was one of my favorite recent projects. It was quite a challenge. Not only were we limited by budget, but were limited by time frame. Any Management 101 class will tell you that in a scenario like that, quality will suffer. Luckily for them, they hired me. I am very good at putting polish on quickly. And these awesome guys do IT – so they were able to build up the infrastructure themselves after the design was complete.
A portfolio of solutions. This is not an academic exercise. I am not a young man just out of college. You will not find projects rejected by clients. Because I feel that design is not as beautiful without the constraints. So each project listed in this site has constraints – limitations. And it is these limitations, which may seem like flaws, that make each project something I am proud of.
Learn MoreMy philosophy begins with two questions:
1. What is design if it does not solve a problem?
2. How can one solve a problem without clearly defining that problem first?
