Portfolio

My portfolio is a vast expansion of my 9-5 working world experience, you can get to know me and find out more about my experience, achievements, and industry experience in my biography. I also run a website development agency called Sunfish Interactive.

My Development credo

I build sites that cost less, work more efficiently, and reach more people. Using forward compatibility my sites excel not only in today's browsers, screen readers, and wireless devices, but in yesterday's, tomorrow's, and next year's.

I use valid standards based semantic (X)HTML markup, CSS layouts, unobtrusive javascripting and DOM manipulation. This process makes content easier to read and easier for search engines to find. Higher Alexa ratings and improved findability metrics are great ways to quantify the value of your site.

Why I do it

You might not know it, but 99% of of websites are obsolete. The signs of decay are creeping up and starting to surface. Your site might look good to you, in a specific browser, but how does it look to your audience? Truth be told, your expensive website from 2005 has begun to fall apart; all of that carefully engineered functionality is beginning to fail.

How you benefit

Your site is presentable not only to your favorite browser(s), but your mother's favorite too! Using clean, valid, semantic markup provide technical benefits, but it makes your site easier to maintain and cheaper to develop, test, and deploy!

Designing with standards means you don't have to create multiple versions of your site to serve multiple browsers/platforms.

  • No more browser/platform specific versions
  • No more 'basic' versions to accomodate old browsers
  • Need a mobile site? No problem, you already have one! Just add an alternate CSS stylesheet and you're in business
  • Need to print your content? No problem, another stylesheet not another entire page/site
  • Worried about Flash being displayed on mobile platforms? No problem, just provide alternative content on the same page instead of building another page/site

As your site becomes lighter, more responsive, and provides your users with a higher performance experience you reap the benefits.

So now you're seeing why valid standards based semantic markup, along with CSS, and unobtrusive javascripting/DOM manipulation allows your content to be easily deployable to a variety of mediums including mobile devices, browsers for people with disabilities, and devices that haven't even been invented yet! New browsers come and go, but your site remains accessible to all.

History

When I first started developing websites back in 2003, standards were just getting off the ground. I barely knew what clean, valid, semantic markup was (let alone what it could do to make your site more favorable to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!). Back then if you wanted your site to work the same in Netscape and Microsoft's 3.0 & 4.0 browsers you had to work in up to 4 different scripting languages and do it all inline.

It all sat on top of a mountain of complex HTML tables (generated by the WYSIWYG of the day, Microsoft Frontpage) which made them up to 60% heavier than they really needed to be, eating up valuable bandwidth and money. Doing a facelift, or redesign meant repurposing all of the content (and scripts) and ended up being much more time intensive and costly than needed.