Alex and I came into contact with one another after he won a prize from the 16th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. I had submitted a custom WordPress theme design and development, and after a few rounds of mockups, we found the best visual solution for Alex to display his work along with a blog to help his work be promoted.

Amber’s part in all of this: Design, Development, WordPress Install, Custom Theme

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

See, there’s this thing… the Real World, as some people call it, and it’s been pulling me around by my hair for a long, long while as I’ve been attempting to build out what you see here, my portfolio, my work.

Work, you say? Why, yes, I have some of that, in spades at some times. See, my “day job” as I like to refer to it is as the senior webmaster at nba.com, and at night, I’m usually found picking up freelance work (hint, I’m accepting work right now).

I’d like to say that when I did get that elusive “free time” that everyone talks about, I was hard at work at this site and its lack of style and panache, but honestly, I do try to spend some good old-fashioned quality time with my daughter, along with picking up a few writing gigs here and there… again, my portfolio suffered for it.

But now, it’s a Brand New Day and it’s time to launch this puppy. This is one of my babies, so please be kind…

Dragonconfilk.com‘s 2010 design came about because of a rushed explanation about the fan track at Dragon*con to someone who was unfamiliar with the science fiction and media convention and what exactly “filk” meant.

I had a vested interest in developing this site, as I have volunteered on the fan track staff for Dragon*con for the last four years continuously, and this site ended up being a labor of love for me, and still is. Built with WordPress as the back-end to allow for our staff to use and communicate with the track fans easily and without much knowledge of coding was a god-send for us.

Next on the list for updating is integrating the forums from an external buddyPress install to be fully integrated with the WordPress site for even more interaction with the fans of the track.

Amber’s part in all of this: Design, Development, WordPress Install, maintenance

Windchild.net was an interesting project to work on because it was taking an existing static site and moving it over to something that the client could update on her own. After looking at many of the open source content management systems, WordPress seemed to be the best option out there for the client, with its ease of installing and updating. Before, any time the client had new articles to publish, she would need to send a formatted Word doc to the designer to re-format into HTML.

For the design of the site, I wanted something that was easily navigable along with inferring the time period of the client’s research, which happens to be pre-16th century Middle Eastern studies, with everything from the clothing to the food from that area and time period. The horse, the centering theme of the page, is taken from an embroidery piece from the time period, which I created the vector image and color scheme from. Next was finding and the client and I falling in love with the background pattern, applying a gradient to calm down the full with background.

While the client is still filling in her back log of research papers and handouts as of this writing, with using WordPress as the back-end, it has become much easier to update her blog and reach all of the people interested in sharing her work.

Amber’s part in all of this: Design, Development, WordPress Install, maintenance