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Freelance Web Sites

Here is a listing of sites I have designed for companies and individuals other than my full-time employer. This list is small at this time, but I expect with time it will grow.

Glenwood Springs Center For The Arts

This is probably one of the most artistic sites I've ever created to date - pro-bono no less! I came on to this project after being asked to design a poster for the 2005 Culinary Arts Festival for the Center For The Arts.

I worked very closely with Gayle and Sinda, the Arts Center directors to come up with a design that was bold, edgy, yet easy to read and use. To help me, they provided a "I like this, like that" type list. I carefully studied the site designs they showed me - borrowed a few ideas from each and added a few elements of my own. This was the first of about 4 designs and the one they selected. I knew I had something as soon as I completed the original Photoshop mock-up. The brick background that appears throughout this site is the actual interior of the building. The pictures are designed in such a way to easily allow the staff to change them out as desired.

This site was the first site I've ever created to extensively use PHP. The class sign-up system posed a significant challenge. The staff didn't have MS Access or an easy means to remotely connect into a database backend but I still had to provide a way of allowing Gayle and Sinda to easily add/remove courses from the site. I decided on a simple XML data file which required me to compose my first DTD. The next step was learn how to use PHP to read in, parse, and grab selected notes of the XML document. After a little research and practice I created my very first XML/PHP based shopping cart system. It's a very simple cart system, but it does the job. Another challenge was to figure out how to link this into PayPal's web site to collect payment. Fortunately PayPal's documentation provided enough detail I was able to put something together that lists each class as a cart item.

Lastly, the splash photo was one of my own I took during the 2006 Cabaret show. My photography appears in various spots throughout the site.

Western Colorado Cycling Club

After joining the Western Colorado Cycling Club I noticed they were lacking a web site or a logo. I decided to help them with both. After seeing the WCCC initials I immediately had some ideas that came to mind as to what I would like to do for the logo. After a few sketches I came up with a design close to what you see today.

I submitted the original designs to the group, they liked it and one of the members named Rebecca Stokes worked on the design to refine it a tad further, giving the riders a more aggressive posture and a few other tweaks to it.

This web site was my second XHTML site I ever produced. The first being the WestStar Bank Expect Action site, which is XHTML-Transitional. The photograph in the top of this site was a shot I took near Windy Point off of transfer trail on one of my off road excursions near Glenwood Springs.

The styling of the site took its cues heavily from the former BSR Sports site.

IT Portfolio

Mark Lessner of IT Portfolio worked with me to come up with this site. He liked the looks of the Duplium and had me design one that was similar in design. The result was this and it went live around May of 2003. Overall I felt that it was a very nice looking site although they have since replaced it with one that uses Flash a bit more extensively than this one does.

Sonoda's Sushi 2

Sonodas contacted IT Portfolio a year or so after the original Sonodas site launched. They wanted something a bit less sea-side and more Japanese looking and gave a couple of web sites they liked. I didn't want to trash that nifty little Flash animation so I decided to use it as a design element.

This site takes advantage of some CSS-P to get the bar effects on the side. Overall I like the look and feel of this site far more than the original Sonodas site I did - apparently they do too. This site launched around January of 2003.

Sonoda's Sushi

I was contracted to design and produce the Sonoda's Sushi web site through IT Portfolio. Sonoda's had a previous web site on CitySearch but the site was fairly basic and didn't offer any leads gathering capability. It can be seen here.

This design stayed well within the look and feel of the previously established media and the physical restaurants themselves. All the food pictures that appear on a white background were taken on my digicam and cleaned up in Adobe Photoshop. I also took all the restaurant pictures that appear on this site, including those in the header. The first iteration of this site was only a 25 hour job and was delivered on budget and on time.

As a bonus, I created the Flash intro for this site. Their biggest competitor has a Flash based web site that is quite impressive and complete. Flash is great for presentation, but for a full scale web site it has a few problems, the biggebiggesthich is it cannot be indexed by search engines. We wanted to stick with a traditional web site for Sonoda's due to time, maintenance, and future expansion but they also wanted Flash. As a good compromise I delivered both.

About a month after the site went live, my very first Flash animation was added to it. To integrate it, I decided to combine it with DHTML rather than have two different home pages. Upon hitting the web site it fills most of the screen (shown here), plays through the animation, and then Flash calls a JavaScript function that "parks" the animation up in the upper corner.

I plan to use Flash more in my future web sites. Flash and DHTML are sometimes considered to be competing technologies. The reality is that both have their relative strengths and weaknesses and can be combined to create some very cool and unusual effects.

AITP - Mile High Chapter - Denver, CO

I was approached at an ICC meeting by one of the board members to re-design the Denver AITP Web Site. I had previously taught a JavaScript course for them so they had known that I do web design and development.

The original site looked like this.

The biggest design goal of this site was to update the look and feel to something much more modern and also promote the 50th Anniversary of the organization. They wanted a simple, clean look that that was unique to Denver. The header graphic was actually based on a digicam photo I took atop Mt. Evans. After a little polishing, I created a tiling mountainous background.