Web Design and Development

I started developing simple web pages in 1998.  Initially, I limited myself to HTML and JavaScript, while incorporating my programming skills in automatically writing programs to automatically generate those pages.  One such site was almost exclusively generated by a custom database program which I wrote for the job.  While working on these sites, I began creating more and more of the graphics which I used with some help and occasional pointers from a friend who is a graphics designer.

Over the summer of 2001, I created a new site for Indianapolis Competition Products at ICPCitation.com.  All of the image designs at the site were my own work (with the small exception of the horse head outline of which a sketch had been completed before I started the project).  Some of the photographs that I used to create the images were taken by me, but a number of the images are ten or more years old - long before I was doing any kind of image design.  A few of images had sections which I had to digitally reconstruct because parts of the original were missing.  If you are interested in my graphics work at the site, I recommend looking at the opening pages, then visit the "Formula Cars" page, and also view the operational theory page of "Variloc Differentials."  Those pages have images that allowed for more creativity than other parts of the site (where most of the images are purely functional for customer browsing).

My experience continued with my work developing early electronic portfolios for singers including Maya Hoover, Andrew Oakden, and my wife.  During that time, I began to work more and more with server-side programming and database driven content.  One such site was Az-Tex Hats, an ecommerce site for a hat manufacturer and retailer; however, since I changed careers, they have a new developer and the website is no longer the same design as I created.

In all my work, I tried to integrate images, text, and design creatively.  For me if the site is not attractive, then it really was not worth doing in the first place.  In 2005, I retired from web design work.  I still help maintain a site or two, but generally my family keeps me too busy to spend much time on it.