You may think this site looks nice or you may think it is not very flashy compared to many other web designer web sites. This site was developed with the purpose of presenting information about the many different skills I have. Web design is just a small part of what I do. I don't design flashy websites that take a lot of bandwidth and have little substance. From studying usability and interface design one of the most important rules I have learned is to remove everything until you can't remove anymore. I prefer simplicity and aesthetically pleasing design. Flash, music, and large images add large overhead that have their use in promoting some businesses or events but are not the best choice for many small business web sites.

This website is optimized, organized, and focused. Most if not every page validates according to XHTML strict standards and has been tested with a variety of browsers to ensure uniformity across various browsers. This means the website is relatively error free and should work well for most users experience. The menus are designed with CSS so that users who disable JavaScript or are blind can still access the various areas. Images and links are properly described and titles and metadata appropriately used to be accessible and optimized for search engines.

This site uses CSS and XHTML for presentation. Divs are used to organize content and CSS specifies the layout of the divs and images. In addition CSS is used for specifying fonts and colors. The design of this entire website can be changed with editing a single document. PHP is used for server side scripting. Duplicate content is all updated from one single file to make it easy to update information and eliminate update errors. The menu and interactions are handled by CSS making the website accessible to handicapped users and those who have JavaScript disabled. CSS colors are used for most of the design to make the website viewable with images disabled and to display when users on slow connections wait for content to load. The website size is relatively small, without the header image the main page is displayed in less than 6 seconds on a 56K connection.

Most of the pages on this site are managed with Movable Type. Movable Type is blogging software but can be used to create templates for automatically generating designs for pages and entries on pages. The sidebar menus and links are all updated as changes are made. New pages will be automatically added to the menu and PHP scripts are used to display tidbits of information on the main page. All of the content can be managed by entering plain text in forms in back end software. I may be able to program, but that doesn't mean I should spend my time formatting the content for my website in HTML.