Philosophy
Web Development Professional since 2003. I'm dedicated to making the world wide web a more beautiful, simple, pleasant and efficient place to spend time through creative web design. The Internet is a constantly changing environment, and I plan to change with it by keeping up on standards and technology.
Based in Port Townsend, WA, I have clients both locally and from across the United States, and am willing to work as a part of a team or as a solo artist performing web design, graphic design, e-commerce, copywriting, search engine optimization and web marketing.
Keep it simple. There's so much going on in the world today that there's nothing better than going to a web site that looks good and is easy to navigate. Visual effect can be gained from well-placed graphics and clever color choice.
Content Management. Information technology has come a long way. I have found that setting up a web site using a Content Managment System (CMS) provides web site owners the ability to easily update the content of the site without having to know any web markup languages, while at the same time affording the web developer relatively easy access to updating the look and feel of the site because of templating systems.
My preferred CMS is Joomla, a PHP system. I also enjoy working with the templating aspects of Django, a development framework written in Python.
Quality Hosting. Sure, you can find a web hosting plan for $50/year, but what will the customer service be like? How many times will your site go offline? What if you want to run and install applications as a unique user so that you can control security? How good will their email services and tools be? All of these things are considerations in choosing a web host. There are two hosts that I currently recommend:
- Olympus.Net. OlympusNet is located in Port Townsend, so affords anyone who operates out of the Olympic Peninsula the luxury of hosting locally. The security features of OlympusNet are unsurpassed by any other host I've encountered. They have excellent customer service with extremely fast response time. Their email tools and account manager allow for a premeire email experience. They are also an ISP, and offer DSL service through Qwest. (If you order DSL directly through Qwest, you may save a bit of money, but your ISP will actually be MSN, so good luck with customer service!)
- Pair Networks. This hosting company runs out of Pittsburgh, PA. I've hosted sites on their servers for about five years, and have been impressed by their quality, pricing, and customer service.
I don't act as a middleman for hosting, but I will gladly assist in setting up the hosting account and acquainting my clients with the features of their hosting and email services. I can also build or maintain web sites that are hosted elsewhere, but a bit more time is always involved in orienting myself to another company's methods.