Baron Samedi Webmastering and Web Design

Webmastering and Web Design

I started doing websites in the Autumn of 1994 when I bought a computer and became a student at the University of Washington. I am entirely self taught (I haven't taken any classes or anything) learning from other websites, books, and from friends and co-workers who also do websites.

I also have a degree in art from the University of Washington which, despite not being a graphic design degree, has helped me in designing sites and translating art to the computer screen.

I can do almost all facets of a website from design, graphical work, HTML coding, hosting, configuration of Apache Webserver, simple e-mail forms, and simple JavaScript embellishments. Below are a few examples of websites that I have created. Next to each is a brief description of the site, and you can click the small image to see a larger version of it so that you can see what it would actually look like.

ToddBunker.com

This is now the latest site that I have done, and unlike the links below, this is a link to the actual site, since it is a live site. A good friend of mine who is an aspiring author came to me to do this site to send to potential publishers. He was looking for a modern style of site, since a good deal of the author pages around are in an older style (parchment backgrounds, typewriter fonts, block print and letter press stuff...) and he wanted to set himself apart from the competition.

We looked at a number of sites and decided on the look of the site. He liked the deep red colors, he liked the paper background for a texture, and he wanted something pretty simple. Unfortunately simple in looks is not always simple in implementation. The structure of the site took a lot of problem solving to get it to all fit together correctly. I also took some publicity photos for him, one of which you can see on the bio page.

There are still some updates to go, such as rotating the author photo every so often, some mouseovers, and links to printable versions of the writings.

DavidKennedyLaw.com

A friend of mine referred me to this David Kennedy who is starting a law firm of his own. It is still a work in progress, but the design is pretty much what it will be in the end. Mr. Kennedy wanted to have a very "attorney" look to the site. So I found a cache somewhere of images relating to justice, put in the Constitution, Lady Justice with the scales, green marble, reddish stained wood, and an American flag.

For the layout I stuck with somewhat of an old standby and that is the header at top, sidebar with menu, and body to the right. I think that this format works the best for scalability. No matter how you resize your browser it is easy to see the site. This is as opposed to sites with right hand sidebars that sometimes get cropped out in a resize, or sites that have both a right and left sidebar that smashes the information in the body of the site.

I also make sure that no matter what size the browser is set to, the background repeats itself the same. I have seen many sites that make background images that tile, and if you size your browser large the background tile repeats itself and often does so over text.

Anyway, take a look at the larger image of this site. I was very proud of my ability to combine the Constitution and the gold relief of Lady Justice nearly seamlessly. The images were made with GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program). You may notice the difference in quality between all of these sites that I am showing off as this one is done with GIMP, the second one was done with Adobe Photoshop, and the last one was done with Aldus Photostyler for Win3.x.

EastsideHarley.com

This was the first site that I made at Ocentrix Inc. This one went through several design changes before it came to this one (currently it is not the Eastside Harley-Davidson website, there was a major redesign of the site in Spring of 2001). I was very happy with the design in the end, although I felt that the backpages had a bit to be desired. If I had the opportunity I would have changed the backpage design, but the customer liked it, and there were other sites that needed to be done.

I had fun with this site doing image rollovers (something that the customer insisted should be used liberally). The center image (the Harley bar and shield) would change depending on what link you had your mouse over. In addition, there was a second rollover at the same time with the stars to the sides of the links. The stars would switch over the the same star but in animated GIF format and the star would spin.

The showpiece of the site was the one part that I didn't do entirely myself, but had a part in. It was an inventory browser that allowed the user to search within the dealership's inventory by part number, or item description. That function was written in PERL, which I have some knowledge of, and am currently brushing up on.

The Vanilla Ice Site

The Vanilla Ice site was the first site that I made, but the original version is no longer magnetically attached to any sort of storage device (it no longer exists). This was the last redesign that I made before I graduated and the Vanilla Ice site was no longer in operation.

This was my first foray into using tables to make image maps. Image maps do not work on all platforms and keeps some people from being able to use a site that employs them. Tables can be seen on nearly any platform and browser including text based browsers like Lynx (which people still use). The menu at the top center is a table. This was also a very information heavy site. In a world wide web of sites with very little content, it made me happy to have a site that actually talked about what it was about. The content heavy nature of the site gave it an interesting life, though.

I decided to make the vanilla Ice site because most other students who made sites would do them about themselves. They would have sites where you could look at their CD collection, see what classes they were taking, or all the information you never wanted to know about their girlfriend. I wanted to make something different. From what I can tell, I was the first to make a Vanilla Ice website. I began to get a large volume of e-mail regarding the site (This was in the days before the ever present hit counter. I had to estimate the number of hits based on how many e-mails I received. On an average I would get two or three e-mails a day about the site). Initially all the mail was hate mail. I had some interesting death threats, one with a picture that looked like it was a picture for the Compton High School Bloods Club, with a bunch of gang members in lines flashing signs. Many were from people who could not speak English very well which resulted in much broken English humor ("I see your movie in last week, I think a %$@*!").

Eventually the mail became positive, as well as somehow assuming that I was, in fact, Vanilla Ice. This set the stage for me to actually meet Vanilla Ice at one point when he had a show in Seattle.

I realize that it is dangerous to put a bad site up as an example of my work, but I put it here for two reasons. The first is because I love it. It was a great learning experience and provided a great introduction to the internet and web design/construction. The second reason is because I think that it shows my improvement. There is a vast difference between this site and the sites above. Improvement is very important, and I want to continue to improve. Hopefully as I do more websites I will be able to become even better at making sites that will both please my clients, and continue to provide me with a challenge and learning experience.