WEB DESIGN

The website that you see before you is designed to be simple, lightweight, and filled with character. I chose typography that leans more towards mid-century modernism, as a nod towards my love for classic cameras and film photography. Headers are intentionally large to show off the font and act as signposts, while paragraphs are narrowed and allowed to breathe. The intended result is a clean, readable, and stylish foundation that accents the contents and displays my accomplishments without being obtrusive.

This site is my sandbox, my playground, my favorite hobby project.

- Use of SSH, command line to administer custom Linux box
- Creative use of simplified color palette

This cat blog is just the best. My wife and I foster cats, and we wanted a place to both hype them up pre-adoption and also to centrally collect updates from their new families post-adoption. Is it any surprise that I decided to build them a blog?

As this was my first site with Oxygen, I started from a template and customized as I went. Again, what stood out to me was that all the design in the world can't save you if you don't have excellent assets - in this case, my photography and the pics we get back from the new familes. 

What I appreciate about Oxygen is that it largely functions as a GUI for CSS. There's no fluff or obfuscation or language changes - a flexbox is a flexbox, text decoration is labeled exactly as such, and if you don't like the menus and want to do it by hand you can just drop in your own code. It's a great learning tool for anyone picking up CSS and HTML, and it's a solid, no-frills experience for anybody who knows it but doesn't want the hassle.

AAA Service Company is a somewhat unique business. Each customer with a signed contract is worth thousands of dollars, and traffic numbers that would be miniscule in some settings can add up to millions of dollars in revenue here. That places very high value on user experience – every customer who bounces off of a landing page represents potentially thousands of dollars lost.

For that reason, we chose Kinsta’s premium WordPress hosting, using Elementor Pro to construct the site. Through relentless A/B testing with Google Optimize, I consistently attacked the bounce rate for our site, driving it to 7% below the industry average at the time of my departure.

One of the signature flourishes that separates the site from a simple business listing is the active and vibrant “Completed Projects” blog. Using Advanced Custom Forms paired with Elementor Pro’s dynamic post templates, I pulled these posts in to enrich otherwise-static pages. I also scored a major local SEO coup by embedding relevant location data in every blog post and then tying them back to our Service Area pages.

- Embedding Dynamic Content to enrich static pages
- Optimizing large WordPress sites
- Debugging page errors through inspector
- Managing large media libraries
- Use of CDN to deliver consistent quality experiences

My first real WordPress website was my very own wedding website. I knew we needed one, and I figured this was as good a time as any to cut my teeth. I purchased dirt-cheap hosting and a domain, and I googled everything else I needed to know. Along the way I had to learn what I needed from a theme, how to customize that theme with the use of simple CSS tricks, and all of the basics of navigating and operating a WordPress site.

This was also an early lesson that the best sites are built on custom (and consistent) assets. Every header, every cover, every illustrative photo came to us from our engagement photos, and that consistent visual palette gave me a firm foundation to build the style from.

After the wedding, this was converted to a static site and is now hosted at Cloudlfare Pages.

- Quick deployment through use of simple templates
- Use of CSS to customize WordPress Theme
- The value of strong custom assets