SITES

SANDCREEK DENTAL

Background. My son Matt is a dentist in Eastern Montana. He was paying a ton of money for his website. When you looked at the source code of the site, it was full of gobblygook spaghetti code, worst I'd ever seen. Also, it wasn't responsive and looked terrible on a mobile device. The site wasn't well organized either.

Creating the Site. I leveraged much of the same content that the site had before, but completely rebuilt from scratch. I was able to rebuild the site in a couple days. We hosted it initially using the sandcreek.dental domain (it's still there) until we got control of the original domain. Now you can see it at sandcreekdental.com. The site is built using a stylesheet that was forked from purecss.io.

ELVIE RENSHAW

Background. My wife Kathy is working on an amazing family history project. She is transforming her grandmother's diaries into PDFs full of photos and sidebars with local history. Her grandmother, Elvie Renshaw, wrote in her diaries EVERY DAY for 50 years! My wife learned Photoshop and InDesign to create these PDFs. Kathy started with the first year, 1929, and is now up to 1962. She still has quite a few years left to go.

Creating the Site. I created the first version of the site in WordPress. Found a cool template and some great plug-ins to create it. The site was fine for a few years. Then it got hacked and the hosting company turned off access to it. I tried restoring from backup copies, but realized they were corrupted too. So I decided not to try and mess with it. I moved the site to a new hosting company to start over. I built it using a responsive Flexbox CSS framework that I modified.

CALKINS FAMILY ASSOCIATION

Background. I joined a family organization that my daughter found called Calkins Family Association. They had a website built in WordPress, but it needed a lot of help. So I volunteered to enhance it.

Creating the Site. I used my favorite dev environment to build the site. Elected not to use WordPress for the main site. Built it using Flexbox, Sass, Jade and CodeKit. Integrated the site with MembershipWorks. Eventually added a guestbook using WordPress on a subdomain.

DEALER INFORMATION

Background. The company I now work for asked me to create an information portal for new employees. Getting up to speed on their industry has a huge learning curve. They wanted me to help them teach new employees about the typical customer, their users, their industry and how their solution solves many of their customers' pain points.

Creating the Site. The microsite needed to be integrated within their company information portal. The home page is a top down layout of a typical truck dealership with different departments. In each department there are links that pop up various models on terms, user personas, products and reports that relate to that department. The image is one big HTML Image Map. I wanted to use an SVG that easily scales, but found that SVGs break down when they get too many links embedded in them. So I switched to the image map. I also found a few great jQuery tools. One is Colorbox that I use to create modals. It works pretty good.

LISA CALKINS

Background. My daughter Lisa wanted a special design for her personal website. She just finished getting her master's degree in Human Factors Engineering from a great university in the U.K.

Creating the Site. Lisa designed the home page and I built it to match. The home page is very custom so I created it from scratch. At the same time, I wanted to make it easy for her to edit and update the pages that followed, so they are created in WordPress. That way she can log in at any point and update the content.

THIS SITE

Background. I built my first site in WordPress back in 2008. It was OK as a getting started site. Then as I learned more about coding, I moved it to a site built on a CSS framework called Bootstrap. The third time was using another CSS framework called purecss. It was a good way to get into coding by leveraging other frameworks.

Creating the Site. This time I built it using a Flexbox framework called Gridlex. More details about this Flexbox grid system.