(A Few Of) These Things That I’ve Done
I’ve been working for the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater’s Continuing Education department as a web developer/computer specialist for just over a year now, and I’ve been working for Beeline Design out of Burlington, WI for slightly longer than that. It just dawned on me that there are actually a few things that I’ve been largely responsible for that are out there on the internet, being used by actual organizations and business and whatnot. I thought it might be interesting to do a little run down of stuff that has made it to the “live” stage that I’ve worked on.
UW-Whitewater Continuing Education Department Redesigns
This is the big one, because it’s a complete re-design of several department’s web pages that I designed from scratch. I’m not trying to take all the credit, the designs were refined and changed after suggestions from my boss and others, but I will say that I did all the image editing, layout, and coding. Not all the departments have been launched with the new design so far, but several have. In addition to the main Continuing Education pages, I created the new Learning Communities and Credit Outreach department pages. The Summer Session and Winterim pages were created using my graphics and layout, but not by me directly.
UW-Whitewater Fairhaven Lecture Series
Although also for UW-Whitewater, the Fairhaven Lecture Series website does not use the same template as the normal department websites. Again, I created the graphics, layout, and code for this page. Also, as was the case with the spring 2009 lecture series, I am responsible for shooting, editing and uploading the video and audio of each podcast.
Yunker Plastics, Inc Redesign
Although this one is fairly old now, it represents my first real attempt at creating a CSS/HTML design from a supplied graphics document. Given Adobe Illustrator files, I attempted to create the layout to be valid in both CSS and HTML, as well as compliant with every browser I could throw at it. I’m sure that, given my experience since then, I could probably do a better job in a shorter period of time if given the task today. Then again, maybe I’m just my own harshest critic and nobody else would notice the little things that bother me about this design (however, I did notice that the slideshow page, which was not added by me, seems to crash in ever browser on my system).
Web Design Isn’t Pretty – A Conclusion
It might not seem like much, but these are just some of the projects that I’ve pretty much created from scratch that are out in the wild, being used today. There have also been a million other sites that I’ve helped fix or spruce up or what have you, but I can’t claim the majority of the credit for those like I can for these.
If there’s one thing that my experience working for the University has taught me, it’s that in a federally funded institution, everything takes a long time to be approved. So there’s always several more projects that have been completed that are sitting around, waiting to be approved by all of the appropriate governing bodies before they can be put into action. Also, I’ve come to appreciate that the majority of your time on the job is not necessarily spent doing anything that is included in your job description. I’ve spent more time shooting and editing videos than anything else, but it’s an interesting new area in which to stretch myself, so I figure it’s all good in the end.
For Beeline, I’ve come to appreciate that not everyone cares about the newest, most “hip” technologies, or whether they have the latest CSS and JavaScript tricks. Small business owners like things that work, and are loath to go in and tinker with something that is doing it’s job just fine, which makes sense. Too many people in my field think that everything needs to be re-written from scratch, when there’s just as much satisfaction to be had from finding elegant ways to slip a new feature into an existing product without mucking everything up, or in getting something that’s been causing headaches for a business owner to operate in a way that more conveniently fits into their workflow.
It may not always be the most glamorous work, but it’s always challenging and there’s always something new to learn.
