Category: Development & CodingPage 1 of 3
I got a call from an old friend of mine at the Beacon Journal. They were going to launch an Arts & Entertainment section called JustGo on their site. It was a company-wide (Knight-Ridder) website and each of the chain newspapers were going to be adding a JustGo component to their sites. He wanted to know if I was interested in coming back to Akron to launch it.
I went to interview and realized what a great opportunity it was, so I took it. I became the Just Go Product Manager, which meant that I would do all the coordinating and planning for the launch, which included designing everything from the logo to the site as well as all the branding and even some of the advertising. I handled marketing and worked out the strategy for the search engine we partnered with. We worked with Zip.com and I set up the categories and zip codes for our target area, using Microsoft Access. I also had weekly conference calls with all the other Just Go editors at other newspapers, where we shared and coordinated coverage. I designed a movie website that all the other editors linked to and after the launch, I set up the coding for the Beacon Journal stories to automatically populate the site’s database. Also after the launch, I designed and maintained the site until the automation worked.
This was a consulting job I was hired for to finish up a WordPress design job for Iacono’s Pizza. They had already chosen a theme and a designer had designed graphics, but I had to do some back-end work to get the staging server to work and I set up the site so we could start working on the design. This was kind of an enhanced editing job. I had to do a lot of formatting in the menu section and basically putting things into place, so they’d work. I tweaked the code to get it to look right.
This was a consulting job for Estep Media Services for a redesign for Phoenix Hydraulic website. All the details were set by the Media Service and Phoenix Hydraulic staff and then they handed it off to me for development.
This was a consulting job for a woman who has a sewing blog. I redesigned her website and helped her organize it better.
This was a consulting job for the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C. I did a contract for their sister company CAS (Chemical Abstracts Systems) in Columbus, OH and when American Chemical Society asked CAS for a recommendation for a WordPress person, they recommended me. The site they needed help with was for a group called Women Chemists Committee, a group of female members of the society.
I filled a full-time role designing digital and print products for the Create Team and coordinated (Managed Projects) in an Agile Environment with the IT Team. This allowed me to use both my design skills and my technical skills in a WordPress environment.
This company wanted to keep his site design, but there were issues with the site, so we switched it over to a WordPress site and added blogging. I used JavaScript and PHP to setup the interactivity. As with most of my sites, I design it and set it up and then I release it to the client and no longer have anything to do with the site.
This was a contract to fix problems with the website that was started by another designer. I redid the design and fixed several issues. The contract was through Robert Half. They have redesigned the site recently.
I did contract work for this Hilliard, OH company coding up e-mails for Bed Bath & Beyond (and Harmon) and proof reading materials for Scottslawn and Roses. This was a 2-month contract that was extended twice.
This website was a consulting job for a rental company in Lancaster, OH. I had to code specialized forms and organize their info and sliders (galleries).
This website was for a contracting company in Boston specializing in placing people for Medical Device and Software and Hardware Engineering positions. I had to recreate the logo because the version they had was low-res and very poor quality. Then I redesigned the site for them with a responsive design. I also edited and wrote some of the content.
I taught a WordPress class Spring Semester 2017 for the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University in Athens, OH. The class basically took all the skills they had learned previously and merged them into a class using WordPress. Most had never used WordPress or Hosting Accounts and domains before, so it was a little bit of everything.