Web Design

For a number of years, mainly during high school, I worked on and off as a freelance web designer. I got into it as a throwaway vocation while poking around online—a basic knowledge of HTML seemed like a valuable thing to have—and ended up interested enough that I kept at it, eventually doing it for pay. I’d pick up work doing small sites for local businesses, via word-of-mouth referrals or occasional advertising through Craigslist or the like. I didn’t work very much, but because I was a high school student with no real expenses, everything I made was cash in my pocket, and I could essentially pick up and put down the business as I pleased; there were times when I literally thought, “I could use some cash,” and sought out work to fill my pockets.

Toward the end of 2005, I came to terms with the grim realities that (1) The general practice of web design had largely lost its allure, and (2) I had never been a very good designer. (I was a competent coder and a conscientious one, which put me ahead of many of the page-butchers out there, but in the aesthetic sense of design, I had no training and no talent other than trial and error.) So I decided to give it up. Nowadays I only get involved with design for the purpose of specific personal projects; my single active site is run through WordPress, which requires little backend involvement on my part.

Below are some of the sites I worked on from start to finish. Nothing is linked that I didn’t create 100% on my own (except where otherwise stated), and at least one complete site is omitted that I’m so ashamed of I’d like to retcon it from my portfolio.

All of my work, incidentally, is standards-correct (though toward the end, not zealously so; I eventually came to terms with the fact that standards were a tool, not a religious practice), valid (X)HTML with CSS used for all positioning. No tables to be found; this was actually an easy accomplishment for me, because I entered the field after the standards movement was widespread, so there was never a tables-to-CSS shift to weather. I hand-code in BBEdit or more recently TextMate, plus Photoshop for graphics, Adobe fonts, Transmit for FTP, Textile for encoding web text, and a few other toys. I habitually use PHPwebhosting.com for hosting, an excellent small-to-moderate-scale host with a dead-low cemented rate and every feature I’ve ever wanted.

Websites