Web Design
From planning to programming

Shown here are websites I designed and then programmed. I can work with you from the earliest stages, brainstorming solutions, providing design sketches, and helping you organize the content. Or maybe you already have a design for the site, and only need a programmer to build it—or to build just one part. Either way, my goals in creating a website are:

• Future flexibility and ease of maintenance.
• Professional graphic design that supports the site’s specific objectives.
• Simple navigation that guides the user rapidly to the most important information.
• Modern web standards and practices, such as HTML5, CSS3, semantic markup, and search-engine optimization (SEO). I do web programming in JavaScript, PHP, and PERL.
• Wide compatibility including responsive design for smartphones, accessibility for low vision and alternative input devices, optimized loading times, and scalable or high-DPI (“retina”) images.

 

Web Animation and 3D

I do custom 2D and 3D web animation, from simple transition effects to in-depth product demos and interactive charts. Animation systems I work with include WebGL/Unity, JavaScript, CSS, SVG, canvas tag animation, and USDZ web-based augmented reality.

 

Making Websites Easy to Update

I can work worth various CMS (Content Management System) solutions, including my own WebUpdater system, which can be deployed under your company’s branding. It is designed to be so simple that even the most non-technical users can be productive immediately, with no training or documentation needed. It’s even easy to use from a smartphone.

Instead of bombarding the site owner with options, WebUpdater is customized to do just what each particular organization needs—and no more. It’s a “virtual webmaster” that I customize for each site, programming it to painlessly handle details that site owners don’t have time to think about:

• Instead of offering complex style tools, WebUpdater automatically insures that the look of the site is maintained.
• It can watch for likely errors and correct them quietly without user intervention. For example: accidentally using an old phone number, a commonly-misspelled name, or a trademark without the ™ symbol.
• It cleans up extra spaces and line-breaks (common when pasting from a word processor) and even has automated typographic “orphan control” to prevent a single word from ending up alone on a line.
• It can make certain words into links automatically, detecting phrases like “contact us” and product names.

WebUpdater is fast, widely compatible, and easily portable: installation is as simple as copying a directory. Data is stored as human-readable text, which generates simple static HTML files. That means the site owner isn’t locked in: changes can easily be made by other methods, and the site keeps working even if WebUpdater is removed.
 

See WebUpdater in Action

Try this demo copy of a WebUpdater deployment that simultaneously updates two touchscreen museum exhibits and a history website that I programmed (exhibit UI design by Impact Communications).

You can create, edit, and rearrange topics, including slideshows with captions and quiz activities with a variety of question types. This then ties into a system I built to allow teachers and museum-goers to take home or share personalized sets of topics, via email or a QR code.