My 14-year career breaks pretty clearly in two phases, though truth be told, I've been in the Web world so long my specialty has changed four times. Back when 14.4 modems were the standard, I was wicked good at crafting fast-loading, optimized sites, but that's a story for another day. That's like saying you were good with a slide rule before calculators were invented.
Coming at this field as a writer who learned everything else as I went, once I learned the basics and the tools, the first half of my career was largely dominated by information architecture and user interface work. Much of this work was done in teams, so I have lots of experience working with developers. As an information architect, I could progress from wireframes to my own HTML, and I usually handled all the front-end coding.
The second half of the career, say from 2003 on, has been dominated by using the principles of usability and information architecture to rack up an outstanding record in producing search engine optimized sites that convert. My ideas, content and copywriting are strong enough to work in a big ad agency, but a funny thing there. I never went into advertising because it's an unstable field; now I've been in a business where all kinds of companies have gone out of business on me.
In terms of the screenshots on the right, my three and a half years of running a network of car loan lead generation Web sites, I'll start at the beginning, my May 2006 interview for that job. There were so many different facets being discussed about the job, so many different skill sets, I asked the interviewer what exactly he was looking for. His answer was to hold up my resume. "This," he said.
Turns out his main concern was how I would deal with other people doing graphic design and then turning it over to me to just make it work Web-wise. My answer was that I preferred it that way. One of the keys in knowing that you're good at something is knowing when somebody can do it better. I learned graphic design from photo editing and newspaper design; I always learn things when working with the Illustrator-first crowd. In the last year there, I was more of an art director than a designer, working with and discussing things with designers, and I loved it. Had the privilege to work with some great people, including this guy.
Reynolds Metals is an example of work I did that's not only gone Web-wise, but the entire corporation is now part of Alcoa. It's just hilarious that my very first (and not very good) site from 1996 is still on the Web, largely untouched and unchanged to this day. I've got a gig of good work that's long gone, but the training-wheel stuff survives. So it goes.
I bring up Reynolds because I started with a freelance job, and as a freelancer, you know the quality of your work by how many times they call you back. And I wound up getting called back four more times.
Three cool side notes from all this. The complex in which I worked was an old-school Skidmore, Owings & Merrill masterpiece, I got to meet Pat and Betty during their 15 minutes of TV commercial fame, and I got to do some educational work for kids. I could spend the rest of my life in online education, but that's a story for another day. Hey, if schools are out of money, save money on textbooks and work it from the Web.
Two sites shown for two reasons. First, if you want to highlight photographs, design on a black background. If you want to do e-commerce, never do anything on a black background. (Hire me and I'll tell you why.)
The second reason, pertaining to the site at right, is that I have been non-disclosed by some of the biggest corporations in America. In the case of one particular author, I'm even non-disclosed when it comes to what I'm non-disclosed about. I bring that up because after a long career as a reporter, I'll ask lots of questions. Don't take it personal and don't worry. I'm just trying to get my head around the nature of the task before me.
Three sites, three stories. My first IT job was with an outfit called Xperts, a company that did a lot of work for the Weather Channel, including its first intranet. While on an Xperts assignment 800 miles from home, faced with driving a rickety VW Thing home during a hurricane, I was spending a lot of time on weather.com and it was dog-slow and getting hit heavily. I sent the Webmaster a little email suggestion to drop the <pragma-no cache> tag in times of high volume. His response: "Thanks. Please send me your resume."
The Scott & Stringfellow financial site recast the standard what we do / how we do it into something street-sign simple. The street sign gave the design some depth, and it let me use some good advice from a previous boss. Sometimes, when you have a big ugly element (like an Old English logo) you have to play it up instead of trying to play it down It'll fade away on its own.
Cyber Clyde, a birthday joke site, shows if what you do for a living is fun, you don't mind doing it to help friends out.
A portal for a statewide justice system rounds out the page.
But before we get to that, two quick bullets:
• A quote about my work from my way-back days as a reporter: "I don't know know what it is, but I always read your stuff to the very end." I've been studying -- and practicing -- the importance of tone in writing for a long time. If you've read this far, won't your customers read this deep, too?
• A point about having a good attitude. Imagine having 12 years of work stored in two different places -- and in a wicked shot of bad luck, having both of them blow up within days of each other. Would anyone notice that all images on this page came from whatever I could salvage via archive.org? No. Nobody cares if I lost stuff. You take the best you can and do the best you can in the time allotted. Life is about doing.
Now about the work at right
Sometimes, when you're designing the layout of the information, you immediately see how it can mesh with a graphic design. In this case, as the content consistently shrank in height left-to-right, the image could grow vertically. Since the project was about linking courthouses, and since I was driving by a bunch of them anyway, the photographer, the designer, the architect, the coder and the person all came together. Sweet.