Hello!
I am an independent web designer and developer working and living in Portland, Ore.
Be it whole websites or user interface design, I hand-craft experiences that are user-centric, reduce friction and delight with serendipitity.
Feel free to find out more about me, who hires me, how I can help, or see some of the projects I’ve completed recently. Or perhaps you’re wondering about cost and/or what you get when you hire me. Are you interested in this website? Whatever the case, if you have any questions I encourage you to simply contact me.
My work is build-to-order custom. I hand-code and am a strong believer in craft, even thought it’s often something that you’ll never even see. Whatever the scope of your need, I always take a mobile-responsive, forward-thinking, holistic approach. My goal is the long-term sustainability of your website, application or experience, and I’ll often invest the time now to ensure versatility later.
Creating a website is something like finding a path through the wilderness. It takes a different route every time. There are hills of content. Sometimes there are forests of photographs, and others, deserts of photographs.
A powerful and focused brand can be a guide, but an unfocused brand often yields a more interesting journey. To be sure, there is entropy and confusion along the way, but as it does every time, it gels by launch, infused with the very DNA of the path it took.
In all my projects, I keep the person for whom the project exists front-of-mind and work to help them achieve their goals, without a lot of fuss. Sometimes that person is the user of an application, sometimes it’s a site visitor, sometimes it’s my client, and sometimes it’s just me.
This might be termed user centric design (or empathetic design), but I am not that formal about it.
Whomever it is, I seek to reduce unnecessary friction while keeping the worthy. And where possible, I try to build in opportunities for a little delight or serendipity to keep things lively. Some designers are all about the objective rather than the subjective. That is not me. When I am done, I want the people who interact with my work to love it. Loving it makes them smile and brings them back.
It’s a good thing the Internet came along— what might I have done for the last two decades otherwise? While I might have found a future in architecture or programming or some other artistic endeavor, as the nexus of design and code, I love the constant change and challenge to balance the multivariate goals of a project that make for the most interesting work day in and day out. (It turns out I am an extremely curious being, but aren’t we all when it’s something we are passionate about?)
As a single-person company, I strive for work/life balance and fail often. Being an entrepreneur means more work than most think, but I’ve given myself an aspirational start as I work from my office in the backyard, blending home and work so that I can spend more time with my wife and two young children.
My typical client is a small- to medium-sized business, often led by an single individual or small team.
When I work with medium-sized businesses, I work on and lead teams utilizing my design, code, user-centric ethic to drive their application user interface decisions for the benefit of their users.
Small businesses that choose me believe in making sure that their brand is authentically represented, inline with company identification and frankly, themselves. (After all, they are a user too.) I work hard to let the brand speak through the design and the process of editing their content fit their own work style and needs. Every project and client is different, and I look to make sure that the end result reflects that individuality.
As I have a long-time, close friend (with whom I share design sensibilities) in the business of Willamette Valley wine, my small business clients do skew to Oregon wineries and vineyards, and I do have alcohol-related, e-commerce and fulfillment experience to serve them.
I’ve been in the business of digital creation for nearly two decades— a period of incredible change and disruption— so it almost goes without saying that I’ve accumulated a wide range of skills. As specialization increases, I am most often termed a generalist, and occasionally, a unicorn. (That I’m a ’corn makes my two-year old daughter happy to be sure, but she doesn’t yet realize it’s a designer + developer.)
If something’s not right for me I have a network of solid designers and developers with whom I trade and team up with regularly. I’m happy to help you find your way to a designer/developer whom you can trust.
~ a short list of skill sets ~
Wordpress / Craft CMS
Shopify Theme Customization
PHP
Ruby
JavaScript
React
Redux
I am always looking to ensure your success and to me that means building a forward-thinking, people-centric website. (And remember that you are users of your site too.) The following topics are my best-practice givens for every website I build.
All design work is mobile-first and responsive to the device on which it is viewed. And here, responsiveness not only applies to the visual design— as in purely making a website design render on a smaller screen— but also to how people will interact with the site.
Simple ways to think about this is that buttons should be bigger on mobile devices, since even tiny fingers are giant in comparison to a mouse pointer. Or that the design should prefer CSS-solutions to JavaScript-solutions whenever possible, since CSS fails nicely and mobile devices are more apt in terms of CSS rendering than JavaScript.
“Time to glass” is the key to people actually seeing your website. If your website takes too long to appear, it tests how much the person is interested and if they are new to the site, they will exit even before the site loads if it take too long.
I strongly believe in getting a website loading within a second to a second and a half at most and utilize a number of best-practice methods to ensure that the site loads quickly.
While I naturally use tools such as PageSpeed against the site to look for improvements, there are typically few opportunities to address by the time the site is testable. Using an overpowered server and caching are two of my tools, but the most impactful method is simply being thoughtful in the design, to reduce the bandwidth needs (and number of requests) that a website makes in the first place, without compromising the design or the brand.
About ninety percent of good, organic SEO is good content aligning with good titles, matching URLs and using descriptions and keywords whenever possible, for every page of the website. While Wordpress provides some base level of these, some simple enhancements make it much stronger.
By default all sites I build include SEO helpers including correct robots.txt and sitemap.xml files. After a site launches, I then monitor the status of Google’s bots via Google Search Console, to ensure that there are no scraping errors or issues.
Whether you intend to utilize social media directly or not, by adding key sharing metadata to the the hidden head of your web pages, you can guide and improve the appearance of your pages when others choose to share them.
This metadata affects sharing regardless of how the page is shared; in other words, it works whether you provide a button on the website or they just paste a link to it in their tweet on their own. Naturally, I work to ensure that this metadata is included and reflects the page content, for all sharable pages.
Unless a different service is requested, I install Google Analytics on all websites I build, so that visitor data can be used to track and evaluate trends. When needed, analytics can be used to answer key questions that guide the development of the website, in terms of content or a feature, but only if it’s been installed, so I install it always.
It also provides a good framework for ad lib tracking how a site is used, such as when a pop-up is closed, or a form submitted. Naturally, these are not baseline to my builds, but added specific to the project.
Visitors to a website may have a poor experience, but will often not take the time to report it to you. I use services to monitor and report errors that occur both on the server and in the person’s browser.
While you typically cannot restore the experience of the person who experienced the error— they are typically anonymous— you can follow up and fix any issue so that it does not continue being an issue. This is especially helpful when new devices and browser updates are occurring all the time.
As I both design and code, my work stretches across typically discrete realms. I work individually and on teams, as the project suits; I create designs that others build and build designs others have made. Contact me to so that I can provide some past examples that match your need and intent.
Nearly all the work I do is custom, so it’s often hard to pin down an estimate for a website or other digital work until I have enough information to know what will be needed for the project. Nonetheless, there are some typical project scopes and if you have a sense of what you’re looking for, I have some starter ballparks to help you budget.
When there is a fixed scope— like a website redesign— I will provide an estimate to set your expectations. Estimated projects are invoiced on the calendar month during the project’s run. All other work is at a per-hour rate, including maintenance. Hourly work is billed on the calendar month as well, unless there is a fixed end. All invoices are net 30; credit cards and checks accepted.
This is a hand-coded website. For the last few years, I have recreated my website using intriguing new technologies as a means of stretching my skills.
If you’re into design, this one is responsive by design, and utilizes TypeKit to provide the slab serif Museo Sans, among other faces. Excluding normalize, it does not use a design framework, but instead relies upon my eye for design and a bit of Fibonacci as a guide for layout.
If you’re deep into technology, this site is a static React.js website based on Gatsby. Because it’s just as easy for me to edit a website by hand as via using a CMS, this one is static.
If you’re into both design and technology, drop me a line as there aren’t many of us out there. We should grab a pint.