Portfolio

Below is a list of web projects that I have been a major contributor. The portfolio is broken down into multiple sections based on the type of work. Along with each listing, I've given design props where they are due, and a brief summary of the project.

Web Sites

I have built all of the sites listed below. Many of these sites have been designed by very talented graphic designers, some, I have designed myself. Please read on to get specific information for each site.

Willard Web Design

Design: Themeforest.net template

Summary: I host my site through Lunarpages and they manage my server in a shared hosting environment. However, I do use the cPanel interface to create redirects, setup permissions, create email accounts, etc, etc. LP does a great job keeping our servers secure and up-to-date. I've used Lunarpages for years with rock solid reliability and customer support. My actual site is rolled into the open-source Drupal Content Management System. I installed and manage the Drupal installation myself (creating the mysql databases, etc, etc). The design for this site came from a themeforest.net template. The template was not created for the Drupal content management system, so I reworked the template to work in Drupal as a site theme.

Champaign County Clerk

Design: Jed Willard

Summary: I worked on the Champaign County Clerk website for nearly 4 years while employed in the County Clerk's Office. The site I inherited had little or no use of CSS, an out-dated left-column navigation scheme and look, and lacked much of the functionality that it contains today.

Of course, this isn't to say it wasn't already a good site, because it was a good site; with loads of content (now containing over 10,000 documents). However, the site was time consuming to manage because of the lack of a template system and almost no use of CSS. A simple act of changing link colors for a given section of the site, required many manual edits. Of course, this was one of the first things I changed after assessing the amount of time spent on simple site maintenance. At the same time, I created a logical document tree (or hierarchy) on the back-end of the site; making it much easier to simply find files/folders.

Also, when I first started in the office, the County Clerk site was hosted on a windows platform via a third-party. We transitioned the site over to a third-party, linux-based solution, which allowed us to reduce our hosting costs in half; yet get much more in the way of service (a win-win all the way around). Eventually, over time, we updated the look of the site and incorporated many "quick links" to much of our important information.

The site was also built with web standards in mind. Upon completion of the new site design/coding in early 2008, the site was W3C XHTML and CSS compliant. In addition, we also added multiple online document searches, a blog, County Board video, google translation tool, and much more. Although I am no longer working in the County Clerk's Office; I am still proud of this site and all of the hard work that was done by all members of the County Clerk staff to make it a reality. I was very fortunate to work for one of, if not the most, tech-savvy of County Clerk's in Illinois; or the entire Country for that matter.