If you'd like to skip straight to the "real" (e.g., I started getting serious) sites, click here.
I've been online since about 1995, browsing through Prodigy's Babysitters' Club pages and Horse Bulletin Boards. Around 1996, the WWW phenomenon hit the scene, and I created a little gem called "Kendall's Horsey Homepage!" Fortunately, it's since been deleted from Angelfire's server due to inactivity. Unfortunately, my second attempt at website creation still remains, and I shall torture all of you with a screenshot of it:
Hideous, I know. The glamorous "blue waves" background image has somehow disappeared, so it looks slightly better than it used to.
The third site I created was one for the local pony club (www.ponyclub.org) I belonged to. After I left for college, I handed the keys over to a young girl in the club who agreed to upkeep it. Bad idea. She changed the site layout and it became a sort of horror house of animated gifs, flashy processed Javascript buttons, and broken links.
My fourth site was probably the most visited of all the sites I had created so far. This one was for the "Bike Across America" bike trip I did when I was 17. I created the site and updated it along the road so parents, friends, and fans could see the group's progress (and our increasingly noticeable tan lines.) Click on the screenshot to see the site in full:
This site is a prime example of checking with a web hosting company to see if the address of your site is case sensitive. Angelfire's addresses are, so I had to make sure to tell everyone to capitalize the "X" in "bikeXusa" or otherwise it wouldn't work.
My next project was during my freshman year at Mount Holyoke. As a new member of the dressage team, I volunteered to revive their old, stale website and create a new one:
When I transferred from MHC, I handed the reins (no pun intended) over to another member of the team. The current site seems to be offline, but if it does reappear on MHC's server, I'll relink it.
The next site I worked with was for Pratt and Whitney as a summer intern... otherwise known as "the first time I ever got paid to mess around in HTML." :) Unfortunately, I can't post any links to this particular site because it contains highly classified information and is accessible only via the company's intranet. I can say, however, that the F135 has to do with the Joint Strike Fighter program. Very, very cool.
I do have a few screen shots of non-classified information. Here's the main F135 page. It's kind of ugly to my eyes now, but I didn't design the layout, so there was nothing I could really do about it.
This next page is for the Award Fee given to the F135 program. I created this one on my own, back in the days when I had a fixation with frames. To be honest, I can't really remember what the Award Fee was for exactly. (That's probably a good thing.) I really like the title graphic that I created.
Webpage #7 was my third attempt at creating a personal webpage. This particular page (created in 2003) was a pretty big deal for me as it was my first time using CSS and Javascript. It's actually a very cute little site as you can see.
In 2004, I decided to update the look of the above page and give it a more artsy look. For some reason I enjoyed the white/blue scrollbar look. I particularly like the header graphic on this one:
In the summer/fall of 2004, I went back to Pratt and Whitney to redesign another department website. This time the "redesign" was essentially a complete overhaul of the existing site. As much as I'd love to share a screen shot of the old site, I will spare you the horror and shock and instead just show the nice, new, user-friendly one. :)
During my junior and senior year I worked with a site run by The Daily Jolt. For those of you (mainly college folks) who don't know about the Daily Jolt... well, you're missing out. Project Jolt was started at Amherst college back in 1999 as a result of a college kid getting fed up with the boring monotony of Amherst's website. Since then, it has expanded to 100 individual, college specific sites that are run by students for students.
What exactly did I do with such a great site? Well, in short, I monitored the forum, changed the page title (when this screenshot was taken it was "Where has the cereal gone?" due to the lack of [good] cereal in the dining hall), added events, put up procrastination links, etc., etc. Oh yeah, and I went out on weekends, took photos of people at frat parties, and posted them. Sounds weird, but it's the most popular feature on to the site.
The site itself remains mostly the same, although it seems like there are quite a few more ads then when I was working with it:
The next five are sites that I've worked on while at EchoDitto, my former employer.
The first assignment I had was to build a functional, Wordpress-powered website called "Protect American Families." My mission was to take a composite of the site (e.g., a giant .jpg of what they wanted it to look like) and break it down into HTML, PHP, and CSS to create a functional website and blog. The design isn't the prettiest, I know - thankfully, that's not my design.
In all seriousness, working on PAF really taught me a lot about producing a website for actual clients as opposed to working directly for my company. Plus, I was able to finally create something a little more dynamic with the use of Wordpress and Democracy in Action, an online campaign manager tool.
[Note: the site seems to be offline at this point - EchoDitto may have given the client the boot - but if I find the original screenshot I will post it.]
My second assignment was building Slingshot.org, which is a political blog that discusses... well, politics. Fortunately, building this site wasn't nearly as complicated as PAF, as it was just a blog. (Not to say that it was easy - just not as in-depth.)
The banner was my doing - originally we had an image of David (you know, David and Goliath... slingshot...), but the apparently it didn't really fly with the client. So I dug around and found the photo of a slingshot being cocked on Getty Images, and voilà, a better banner.
Click on the screenshot to see the site:
One of my ongoing projects is for a satellite company called SES-Americom. The first phase of work involved redesigning their American counterpart site called AMERICOM Government Services. They've actually shown a few TV ads recently promoting the company, toting the phrase "It really is Rocket Science." It's kind of neat to see the URL to a site you've developed.
Click on the screenshot to see the site itself:
The other portion of the first phase was the development of a blog called "Really Rocket Science." Building the blog was very interesting, because it was my first time using Drupal. Basically, Drupal makes Wordpress look like Sesame Street, which should give you an idea of what it's like to work with. ;)
Click on the screenshot to see the actual site:
My last project with EchoDitto was for the Chernobyl Children Project, USA. It mainly entailed a site redesign to be launched in time for the 20th Anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. (Side note: thankfully, the logo is not my creation - some company did it for CCP as a pro bono gift. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of it. ;)
Click on the screenshot to see the site:
Some other sites I've worked with while at EchoDitto (not necessarily as a tech lead, but more of tech support) are Since Sliced Bread, Rosie O'Donnell's blog, the U.N. World Food Programme, and the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.
My latest foray on the internet has been with my current employer, U.S. News & World Report. No more griping about clients' bad taste in design! (Not to say that I'm in love with the animated ads that U.S. News puts up for revenue.) Of course, there is always some evil that comes with the job, and this one happens to be Movable Type. After working with it for awhile, I've come to appreciate Drupal if only for the fact that it has adequate documentation. Anyway, here's one of the MT pages I completed for the Politics section:
My sincerest apologies if the Viagra promo ad shows up in the right sidebar - the stupid thing will start playing audio if you accidentally roll your mouse over it.
After doing the Politics gig, I worked on the new Best Hospitals section. I just finished up U.S. News' famed Best College online edition, which was a real learning experience:
Currently I work for Booz Allen Hamilton, a global consulting firm. The project (I work on does contain sensitive information, so I'm limited in what I can show. However, I can show a screenshot of the application's "public view" (unclassified/published material). It's not the most exciting looking, but it's a powerful application and I'm proud to be a part of it. :)
The screenshots below are from a "website that never was." The website I intended to work on was for Area II of the U.S. Eventing Association. The USEA has divided up the country into zones/"areas" for the sake of competitions, riders, and to generally keep everything neat and tidy. As a member, I volunteered to redesign/revamp the existing site sometime last year, as it had sort of fallen by the wayside. I decided to use Wordpress as a CMS, as I wanted to keep updating the site as easy and pain-free as possible for anyone else involved. I used a variety of programs and technologies in development, such as Mozilla Sunbird and PHP iCalendar, PHP Classifieds, RSS, PHP scripts, and a slew of Wordpress plugins.
I was very proud of myself for putting this all together on my own, plus it was fun and educational! Unfortunately, my version was never launched for a myriad of reasons; the main one being lack of communication with USEA, and the other being what boils down to politics. I was pretty angry upon hearing my hard work would essentially be trashed, but it served as an important reminder that keeping the lines of communication open and following up are key in any area of life. I was (and still am) sad that my efforts were eschewed, as this was my first "from scratch" project that wasn't personal nor was I getting paid to do... but I still enjoyed every minute of it.