More Freelance Work
November 17, 2008
This year has turned out to be a much busier year of building web sites freelance for clients than anticipated. At the end of last year I worked on a project with J. Riley Creative, a graphics design agency started by my friend Julie; I unexpectedly had the opportunity to build quite a few more sites with her this year. Julie does quality graphics work, and it’s been fun collaborating with her. Here’s a sampling of the work we’ve done throughout the summer and fall.
NAWBO Houston
This non-profit organization’s web site had stagnated because it was too difficult to update. Julie provided a fresh new design that I built into WordPress, which has made it easier for them to add news items and update the calendar of events.
Joseph & Company
This client hired us to design a smart, professional-looking web site that clearly reflected their image as an expert in their field. The client insisted on having some Flash animation, which Julie created. I don’t work much with Flash (I personally find the animation and the potential error messages distracting), so this gave me a good chance to experiment with the swfobject JavaScript library that incorporates Flash files into web pages as cleanly as possible.
I’d been wanting to try out this library for some time, and I was quite happy with the results. If the user does not have Flash installed, I coded the site to use static images instead of the Flash files so the user never sees an error message. I thought this was a good solution since the animation was not essential to the content.
Sagemont Blogs
Julie provided a new design for this church’s web site, and the church had its own in-house development team that wrote the new code for it. I joined the redesign project near the end to install and configure WordPress MU, a version of WordPress that powers multiple blogs. (Each of their 20+ ministries now has a blog they can run themselves, and all the blogs can be managed centrally by one administrator.) It was a bit of a challenge integrating their new site built in Microsoft technologies on one domain with PHP blogging software on a different domain, but I think it turned out fairly well.
J. Riley Creative
After collaborating with Julie on client projects, it seemed like a good idea to to collaborate on some of our own personal projects. She had created a new design for her portfolio site over the summer, but she needed someone to build it. We launched the site last week. It was a fun and challenging site. Little design details are a lot more important on a graphic designer’s web site than on most other sites. (The font stack, for example, containing twelve different specified fonts and two different font weights, was the most complex one I had ever created.) I was happy to get experience using some new JavaScript tools for the animated gallery on the home page and for the image zoom on the project pages.
(Julie will be doing some design work for one of my projects that I hope to launch in the spring or summer. Stay tuned.)
I have continued to work more with WordPress for all of these projects, and I really like the power it offers. It began as a platform for creating blog sites, so I usually have to customize it a bit to make it work for more static, corporate sites like these. But it really is a great tool for clients to manage their own web sites, and a lot of development has been done on it over the past year. Julie and I have a couple more client projects lined up for the end of this year and the beginning of next year, to which I am definitely looking forward.
One new improvement to my HTML/CSS development process is worth mentioning. I have found it extremely useful to use a reset stylesheet. This code removes all the CSS style information applied to HTML elements by the browser. Since browsers all have slightly different defaults, this has been a tremendous help in getting sites to work the same in different browsers. One unforeseen benefit is that it makes tools like Firebug even more useful; since the default styles have been stripped away, every style is explicitly declared and therefore visible through these tools.
After the reset stylesheet, I also apply a typgraphy stylesheet from the Blueprint CSS framework (with slight modification), which sets up some really nice default styles that are then the same across all browsers. (I haven’t used any of the other stylesheets included in this framework; I still to prefer to handcraft my CSS layouts by hand.) I combine these two stylesheets together into a 4 KB stylesheet, pretty small and well worth it for the consistency and the ease of development it adds.