What I Do

Here's a pretty comprehensive list of the stuff I do. Below, there's a less comprehensive list of the tools and techniques I use to do the stuff I do. Contact me if you want clarification on anything.

Design

There's "big-D-Design" and "little-d-design". One of them incorporates Workflow, User Experience, Information Architecture, and similar high-level disciplines to create coherence and usability and enable accomplishing tasks. The other one, no less important and often closely related, packages content in an aesthetically pleasing manner, also aiming for coherence and usability. I'm better at the first but can do the second and know where to get help. I forget which one has the big "D".

Development

That once meant building websites, but since the trend now is away from brochure-sites and towards Rich Internet Applications it has come to mean something closer to application development. Even brochure-sites can get complicated with animations and widgets (see Shiny Stuff, below.)

Maintenance

Updates and upgrades, tweaks and mods, installing widgets, revising content, fixing broke things—this just means I'd be as happy working on your current site or application as I would be making you a new one. Almost.

Hosting

OK, I don't really DO hosting, but I can see that it gets done. You're going to hold the contract with the hosting company, though, I'll just be the enabler. Web hosting should be left to people who really understand the security issues. It's cheap.

Shiny Stuff

Bells, whistles, drop-shadows, widgets, animations. Once requiring Flash (and so a Flash developer and an intrusive technology) or lots of effort to avoid total lameness, JavaScript libraries have appeared in the last few years that make it much easier to unobtrusively add animation effects and interactivity using a technology native to your browser. My Sandbox has examples of that sort of thing. I can do Flash, too.

Tools and Apps

Content Management

• Joomla!—Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) with a huge development community and installed base. You can honestly be up and running in half an hour if you can use one of the standard presentation themes, but customization can be troublesome because logic and presentation aren't completely separated. Written in PHP.
• Wordpress—really a blogging application (I use it for mine) it also makes a pretty good platform for a small website even if you don't want a blog. The user interface is simple and it's easy to customize to make it look the way you want. FOSS, written in PHP, and you can be entering content in five minutes with this. Once, that is, your web host has done their part. Maybe fifteen if I install it for you.
• FarCry—a versatile enterprise-level application platform with a CMS, also FOSS. It's written in ColdFusion which limits the size of the development community some and requires more expensive hosting, but is the best there is at keeping content, presentation and logic separate from each other.

Languages

• HTML and CSS (yes, I know they're mark-up, not languages, but I'm really good with both);
• JavaScript (this is the thing native to your browser that enables lot of shiny stuff);
• PHP;
• ColdFusion;
• ActionScript (the language behind Flash);

Acronyms and Buzzwords (Ignore this, I just like keeping the list)

• AJAX
• XML
• OOP
• jQuery
• Mashup
• Quick Prototyping
• Agile Development
• Code Re-use
• Repurposing