Philosophy
A website can fulfill a wide spectrum of needs. It may simply serve as an enhanced business card, where customers and potential customers can connect with a business, or can provide services and functionality that help and optimize business operations.
Throughout my career as a software developer, I’ve built and managed projects for many major companies and organizations; Adobe, Microsoft, HP, and Disney to name a few. I’ve learned that bigger is not necessarily better, and believe it or not I don’t think everyone needs a website or internet presence. But if your needs have expanded beyond what’s available through social media and other low/no cost options, a website might be the right thing to increase your visibility.
WordPress has become my primary framework for website development. Building a custom website from the ground-up is great, but that can present challenges for managing and updating components in the ever-changing world of the internet, and WordPress has a great foundation and many free or low-cost options to customize sites to meet specific business needs. Since WordPress is so popular, there are requirements that should be met for any site – security, SEO, and performance to name a few – and there are many tools available that help meet these needs. I also follow stringent standards for site development and deployment to ensure that websites are built and maintained with the utmost quality, and my clients can rest assured that their customers and guests will have a great experience when interacting with their site.
My recent focus has been to work with businesses and individuals in the fields of music and arts. If you’d like my opinion or assistance in creating or updating your web presence, please fill out my contact form and we’ll get connected and see if what I offer is a good fit for your needs.
Here is a list of my current projects.
Client: Washington Music Educators Association
Washington Music Educators Association’s website was in need of a well overdue redesign, and lacked functionality that would provide their staff with tools to manage things like online payments, membership, and school/district data. Based on the Studio Press News Pro theme, custom functionality was developed to meet many of their needs.
Visit Site: WMEA.org
Client: Northwest Music Mentors
Northwest Music Mentors is a nonprofit organization I founded, with the mission to support music education in public schools by connecting professional musicians with music classrooms to act as mentors to those students. Built as a child theme of Primer, functionality was added for creating a directory of mentors that music teachers could access, and custom reporting and scheduling tools were created for managing mentoring assignments.
Visit Site: Northwest Music Mentors
Client: Lynnette Thredgold
Lynnette Thredgold, a professional violin artist and performer, requested a modernization of her website to help attract new clients and highlight her music and live performances. This site uses a custom child them based on the WP Sierra, providing tightly integrated custom CSS to optimize performance.
Visit Site: Lynnette.com
Client: Johnni Aguirre
A friend requested help with their portfolio website. It was running on an old version of WordPress, was slow, not very secure, and ran an older unsupported theme. We worked together to come up with new ways to present some of her work, reviewed plug-ins and themes that would add desired functionality while maintaining the original design, and performed updates to many components, both those related to WordPress and to the hosting environment.
Visit Site: JohnniAguirre.com
Client: Jim Cutler
This is my personal website, using an out-of-the-box implementation of the Primer theme. Nothing fancy, but there is customization to provide rendering and presentation for specific image-based functionality.
Visit Site: You’re already here!