Professional Sites
These are projects that I've worked on for other people and organizations in a professional capacity. Currently, I'm helping Treasures 4 Teachers with web marketing through their Google Ads Grant and Bridging AZ Furniture Bank and their nonprofit furniture store Got Legs to manage their Ad Grant, WooCommerce listings, and social media posts.
One of the images on this page, the one with the dark blue outline, will appear as a large image in a modal box when clicked.
Veterans' Furniture Project (VFP)
Dates of the Project: February 2023 to Present
I created this site for a project that was started under the Bridging AZ Furniture Bank that became an independent nonprofit in its own right. The Veterans’ Furniture Project (VFP) is a workshop where disabled, unemployed, and formerly homeless American veterans learn how to build and design furniture and other products. In the process, they rebuild their own lives, regaining confidence, learning basic and advanced woodworking skills and helping their community.
The VFP site is a WordPress website that I created using the Twenty Twenty-Three Theme and BoldGrid. This is an on-going project, and its design may change as I continue to maintain the site.
New Frontiers For Lifelong Learning
Dates of the Project: May 2018 to March 1, 2019
New Frontiers for Lifelong Learning is an organization affiliated with Mesa Community College, dedicated to helping seniors and retirees to expand their horizons through educational opportunities and social activities. When they decided to redevelop their website in 2018, one of my professors recommended me to the organization's webmaster, Allan Zisner, and he asked me to help him create a new design for their site.
Putting together this project was partly an experiment, using design concepts that I had used before for previous projects and adapting them to suit the needs of New Frontiers. I had the opportunity to make some small icon graphics and try out some new design techniques, such as creating mock photo corners for the images in the gallery of council members and decorative styles for horizontal rules and headings. I particularly wanted the heading decorations and the horizontal rules to mimic the curved swoop design in the page header. I also had to meet regularly with the New Frontiers webmaster, getting his feedback and accommodating his requirements. This was my first assignment where I was the lead designer, but I think what I learned the most from this project was how to work as a team with my client. I had some leeway for creativity, but I also had to follow the directions of the New Frontiers webmaster, trying to make his vision of the project a reality and make it as easy as possible for him to maintain the site in the future.
Since I helped to redesign the site, I know that it has changed somewhat and will continue to undergo changes as it is updated by the organization's webmaster, but I would like to talk about some of the design features that I originally created for the site.
I designed the site using Dreamweaver, making it to the webmaster's specifications in color and layout. The photographs were provided by the organization, some of them coming from the organization's newsletters. Most of the smaller icons on the Member's Toolbox, Facilitator's Toolbox, and Classes pages are from Pixabay. I created the small icons on the Contact page myself, using Adobe Photoshop.
I designed a special Photo Album page for the site that would feature a Photo of the Month and separate sections for photographs of different events. Each of the sections was decorated with the same imitation photo corners that I used on other photographs on the site, including the pictures of the Council Members. Within each section, I also included thumb nails of event pictures with special styles to make it look like they were piled on top of each other and at different angles, as if someone were sorting through them for inclusion in the photo album. This page looks different now on the active site.
The site is responsive to different screen sizes. The main menu collapses to a drop-down menu, and the sidebars also drop beneath the main content sections on small screens. Images also resize and move on smaller screens. For example, the display of council members' photographs positions the images differently on different sizes of screens.
Sites I Help Maintain
These are professional websites that I didn't create myself but help with site maintenance.
Got Legs Furniture & Décor
Dates of the Project: February 2022 to Present
Aside from helping them with web marketing through their Google Ads Grant, I've also been helping to maintain their website, manage their WooCommerce listings, and create social media posts about them on Facebook and Instagram.
JLNArt
Dates of the Project: March 2023
I helped the artist to get her site up and running to display her paintings! It's a WordPress site made with the Raft theme.