About the Website
This website is a showcase of my best school projects that I have completed during my studies at ECPI College of Technology. Projects are organized here by category, skill, and specific skillset, generally. Originally, this site started out as a collection of pages, organized by course, that I hosted simply as a medium of turning in my assignments to the instructor. I would publish the entire project to a webpage and then just email the instructor the address to the page.
It grew from there, and I decided to add to it other school projects from ECPI that I had already completed. I could then showcase my projects to any party interested in viewing my student work. I added the rest of the pages to make it a fully functional website. The intended purpose is to demonstrate my skills to friends, family, potential employers, and potential clients.
The first incarnation of this student portfolio website was created in HTML and was styled and structured in a completely different manner. The visual appearance relied heavily on detailed styling of HTML elements' properties rather than actual graphic image files. The image files that were used were very minimal and were mainly for repeating backgrounds. The site was created in HTML 4 Transitional, and it was very tedious to design and maintain. I taught myself a lot about CSS during the development of that design; the site styling is quite detailed and even made use of rollovers. I worked hard to make sure that all of my markup and styling was W3C standards compliant.
A major revision to this website happened after I finished my zen garden project. I had learned so much more by this point about proper document structure and visual appearance. My skills progressed to where my expertise with CSS could be utlized effectively with careful image use to produce an appealing appearance in neat, effecient documents. The new design was written in XHTML Transitional because the markup I had become acccustomed to met the standards anyway. It seemed a good choice that would retain broad compatibility for longer time. This design also addresses browser compatibilities; I have labored much to make the website work properly on the major platforms with minimum specifications.
Learning php, combined with other skills that I have acquired, allowed me to revise how the site is structured. My approach to web design is now more modular and flexible. To every extent possible, the website is organized so most content is reached within as few clicks as possible. This has to be balanced with division and structure of the content. This revision to the website was more behind the scenes and did not cause major changes to the visual appearance. It did allow my design and maintainance workflow to be much more effecient and has given me the capability to develop a few tools for the website. Like my contact form, for example, which I invite you to use to send me your comments. I hope you enjoy browsing this website every bit as much as I enjoyed obsessively designing it.