About Me
I am a web designer and developer and I live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area. Born and raised in Bakersfield, CA, I dabbled in painting and photography at a young age. I earned my BS in Psychology from St. Mary's College but didn't find my calling until a friend showed me how to make a website. Needless to say, I was hooked. For several years, I took classes at night and taught myself how to design and code website. Over time, I developed design and coding skills that focused on clean, usable interfaces with standards-based code and architecture.
Over the years, I have made sites for businesses in the clothing industry, agriculture, corporate moving services, financial consultants, etc. Currently, I work for 1105 Media as a web producer in the attendee marketing department. We produce webistes and marketing materials for a large number of Microsoft and government related conferences. I am lucky to be working with a great team of colleagues and managers.
How I Work
1. Consultation
During the initial part of the project, we talk about your needs, budget, timeline and tastes. If the situation seems like a good fit for both of us, we move forward.
2. Contracting
The next step is to crystalize the scope of the project (i.e. website, html email, banner ads, QA work, etc.), set up a reasonable set of milestones, assertain and remedy domain/hosting situation, and agree on the project's cost, billing and payment methods.
3. Wireframing & Content Development
This is a very important stage. Here, we talk about what content you want to put on the site, how much of it, and how it's going to be layed out. This is a highly collaborative stage and really helps the desing process go smoothly.
4. Design Development
Once we have content wireframes locked-down, we can get into the desing stage. I will produce up to 3 rounds of designs for the website. These will be fully fleshed out mock-ups that cover all the different lay-outs constructed during the wireframing stage.
5. Coding and Testing
After we achieve consensus on a great set of designs, I move into the coding stage and convert all designes into living, functional web pages. After that, I test all of them to make sure they look great in all the major internet browsers (including IE6). I even give you visual reports of this so you can see for yourself. During this stage, I keep all the code on a testing server.
6. Completion & Maintenance
When the site is ready to go live, I publish it to the web. I also send your site's information to the major search engines for indexing. This, along with the well-organized code I write, really helps increase your page ranking with search engines.