Past Web Work

I worked at JGMS for seven years as a Business Development Assistant and Designer. While there I created multi-volume proposals for federal contracts, I built and managed a SharePoint and customer relationship management system, and I built and managed this website along with several others. 

Like the other sites, this site was built in WordPress using the Canvas framework by WooCommerce. Canvas worked a lot like modern website builder plugins but relied on the user's knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript a bit more.

This initial website started a nice chain of web design work through our teaming partners and a few local businesses. It also made me see how useful a standardized workflow was. They build client trust in your work while also supplying you with the stakeholder and user data you need to build a product that fulfills the client's needs. This is where I became more curious and passionate about building good user experience.

Many of these engineering firm websites have very similar features; information about their services, what states and what government entities they have previously worked with, lists of alphabet soup codes that only mean anything to an extremely niche audience, etc. I have managed to find ways to display information in a way that is useable, accessible, and findable while still giving the site some personality.

Sigma Science was another of the small business teaming partners for whom I created print and web work. Their requirements ran parallel to those of the company I worked for directly. Their marketing wasn't quite as sophisticated as ours but their work came with some terrific imagery. At the time, obviously, the hero banner/slider was a big sell point with everyone. It was an easy way to add some motion, grab attention, and get some 10 to 15 word phrases in front of the audience so they knew what you were about as soon as they hit your site. 

I spent a lot of time cutting down verbiage, and trying to convey messages succinctly on this site. I used tabs and accordions heavily to make that information overload more manageable. I also managed to reduce the top navigation to just four links from multiple links with dropdowns. This also improved the depth of the breadcrumb trail to a single level.

I had just read Stephen Krug's Don't Make Me Think Revisited for the first time and was dead set on making sure every page was easy to get to and move away from. I made sure contact information was available everywhere, and that the front page told people exactly what they were looking at and what they could expect.

RRC was a case of an extremely outdated website in need of modern features and the ability to post news releases and past performance information as the company grew. RRC is a company owned under a Native Hawai'ian Organization (NHO) called 'Aumakua Hawai'i that also owns a Grand Junction company called Information Technology Solutions. Again, I used Canvas from WooCommerce because of the speed and agility. I only had a couple of days before we were meeting the owner in San Diego for a Society of American Military Engineers (SAME) conference with a couple of our other small business teaming partners. With a limited schedule, I was still able to build something fairly unique with strong usability that still stands today (~10 years) even though they are not a current client.

Since I was unable to do any user research or testing, I made sure to try and meet the factors that influence UX from the User Experience Honeycomb as described by Peter Morville. I kept the text simple so contracting officers could take a quick look at the business capabilities (accessible, useable, useful). I used bread crumbs to help guide them through topics and pages in a logical way (findable). I managed (a decade ago) to add some "desirable" qualities with a self sliding "About" area and interesting topic-specific imagery in places we needed user interest most. If I'd had more time with Mr. Kaluhiokalani's site, I would have taken another pass at his text to fix the voice slightly so it spoke more directly to the potential teaming partners and the federal government contracting officers he was interested in attracting.

RBW Technical Services is a Colorado-based, woman-owned business that provides a full range of up-to-date training, consulting, and compliance services. It was important that they have a live calendar as well as a blog section for articles, posts, and course offerings that they could update in-house. I worked with them to find a calendar tool they would be comfortable using. While we did use the workflow I'd used on previous sites, extra time was spent on card sorting excersizes to determine how to classify each article, blog post, and course offering type. It was the best way to keep the posted information in the defined sections for each of those post types.

This was also a WordPress site built with the Canvas framework.

Bowie’s website was outdated and was not capable of the features requested by the company. They wanted a section in which they could post press releases and pages on which they could update coal quality information. The turn around on the website was very short and did not allow for a lot of preparation or planning. I jumped from client interviews, worked in a couple of simple user experience research methodologies (personas based on their description of who would be their audience and card sorting) then I went directly into the build phase. This was possible with updating their site to a CMS (WordPress) website.

Here, like many of the other sites I have built, I used the WooCommerce Canvas template that could be customized in to many different types of sites and pages through the use of the built in options panel, CSS, and hand coded HTML and JavaScript. Bowie has since been bought by Wolverine Fuels. Whoever has taken over the site is still using much of my original design but the template is starting to show its age.