Web Team

This site looks pretty simple on the surface but sports both a blog and a retail store with shipping built in. Working with a project manager, writer, graphic artist as well as the owners brought this site to the world. Behind the scenes there is also a system to assist with the management of distribution and sales to larger vendors.

It started with a simple "I'm doing this site and I'm having some trouble with the theming and a couple of modules. Can you look at it?" Complicated sophisticated site that moves and pinwheels and is just gorgeous. Half way through the project, the psds for the site showed up. They didn't look very much like what we were working with. Incredibly complex permissions and roles to allow the association to communicate at a very complicated level. A rocky server move and the site went live.

This simple site was developed initially as a Wordpress site to replace a simple one page domain placeholder. In transferring the design to Drupal we maintained the simple admin interface in the backend. The move positions the site for the future with a much more robust foundation. The simple design is highly optimized for SEO as well as XHTML (Strict) valid.

Though this site is not on my hosting, I built it with Drupal through Cpanel and ftp. Used to working on the backbone with shell to move files and compress and uncompress files, it slowed down construction and introduced some interesting challenges. The site development came to me through a system adminstrator/contractor. He supplied me with a psd from a graphic designer that I had worked with before. I worked out the functionality and created the Drupal template from the design.

Once I thought I would be a web writer and while I still do a bit of writing most of my work these days is technical and theme related. My introduction to complex sites came as a writer for Northern Saskatchewan Toursim. I can't be held responsible for the layout or theming of this site as it conformed to standards set by Tourism Saskatchewan. Seven years later though - the writing still stands.

When I heard about the PMC- Sierra work I was intimidated by the sheer size of the project. It wasn't until I went for my "technical interview" with them that I realized I would be part of a team reskinning 2500 pages of website. Working in a largely Unix environment I brought my familiarity and skill with CSS to bear. Moving the site to valid W3C standards, developing a detailed testing plan, as well as doing the housecleaning on major sections of unused site (identifying 3,500 files for deletion) were major achievments while I was working with the team.