Web Design

Creating a great site takes a solid idea, top quality writing, uncluttered graphic design, organization, and clear navigation. I don't believe anyone can do all of that alone. I find the best sites are designed by a team of two or three — and that's how I work. I focus on organization, navigation, and content. For the visual design and programming such as JavaScript, PHP and SQL, I work with great people I love and respect fully. And I don't take on a job unless sure I can do you justice.

My web design history

When I dove into web design I didn't just learn a bit of HMTL and build one of those long, long pages full of anchors. No, not me. Most people start with a simple site. I started with the creation of a back-end database, HTML pages that fed the database, and HTML pages that were created solely within the database then served back to the browser.

One day I knew nothing about web design or running a web server. I didn't have a clue what was involved. Then a friend at Apple suggested I write about using FileMaker Pro to generate web pages. Using WebSTAR I quickly mastered web serving. And with help from the amazing Eric Bickford I soon knew how to take data from a FileMaker Pro database and merge it into Claris HomePage-made HTML pages. I loved using Eric's WebFM as my CGI to have web pages communicate with FileMaker Pro databases.

As I learned, I documented, writing a book for then-new Claris Press. However, the timing was not right at Claris and the book did not come to be. Some of my work on this was published in Net Professional magazine. I also helped write the WebFM manual. I also learned another CGI, called Tango, and helped teach and develop Tango classes at the time.

As part of that book process I looked at each of the WYSIWIG web page editors. Once I saw GoLive, then called GoLive CyberStudio, I fell in love. GoLive didn't just make it easy to create web pages. It was a full site management tool. I started with version 1 or 2 and have kept loving and using GoLive ever since.

When the opportunity to write about GoLive came up I jumped on it. The result is my Adobe GoLive 5 Bible, 1100+ pages on not just the how, but the what and why of site creation using GoLive. That book earned me the nickname, Xena of GoLive.

In January 2001, Mac Design magazine was born and I became its GoLive columnist. I write the how-to column there, the tips, and the Q&A. I also wrote the GoLiveCS review. (I do other pieces from the publisher too, but that's another topic.)

Some of my websites

• Paradise Villas assisted home care senior residence
  Replacement of an existing site, rewritten and redesigned from the ground up so it will be found on the internet. The previous site had no text and did not come up appropriately in searches.
• San Gabriel Macintosh User Group (2004-2007)
  This site was created by me from scratch except for the gift of the "frame" that friend Scott Immerman "loaned" to me. I penned and maintained it from 2004-2007. This design is down now, being replaced by a blog.
• Magic Bob Weiss
  Magic Bob's website was created from scratch in GoLive 5. Bob provided the images of himself and photos used within. The design and words are mine, as the result of discussions with Bob, of course. This site was done partly as a series of experiments on GoLive 5.
• Matthew Jenal, Financial Expert
  The challenge: what do you do for the personal site of a financial specialist? A site full of dollar sign images doesn't fit Matt. Instead, I used the text as the design with a simple graph paper background, which seemed befitting. The graph paper happens to be the work of designer Mark Jaress. Mark created it for me to share with readers on my GoLive 5 Bible's CD.
• Digital Media Marketing Organization
  The agreement on this site was that I'd create it using whatever graphics the organization supplied to me. The basic words were provided and I worked on them from there, so the text is a combination of theirs and mine.
• Divorce: the musical
  I had one day to get this site up and for material was given a graphic of the film's "onesheet." I quickly turned it into a PDF, cropped it in Photoshop, sliced it up, and popped it into GoLive.
• Mac Gathering event website with online registration
• Full Fashions For Less (Now offline)
  Mario Salinas designed the masthead for this retail clothing site while I did the rest. The shopping mechanism is not yet complete. I expect we will use Servoy to do the backend.
• WebGrrls-LA
  This site is long gone. I took it down, unhappy with the way the organization was run. Unfortuantely I lost the home page from that site because I'd love to still have its functionality. It was an amazing database-driven site where members could create a record for themselves and list their work availability, listing sites they created as an online portfolio. (Common now, but amazing back then in 1996!) For the design I'd used HomePage. The data was stored in and served from FileMaker Pro 3 via a then-ground-breaking CGI called WebFM by Eric Bickford.
• GoLiveBible.com
  This is the official website for my book, the Adobe GoLive 5 Bible. The design here is a team effort. I stated it and Mario & Sheri Salinas made it interesting and polished it. As there was never another version of this book due to changes in direction by the publisher, I have not added to the site in the past year.

How to contact me for web design

If you'd like to consider having me and my team create or recreate your website, please send me an email. Please let me know what you have in mind, what your resources are, and what you timeframe is. Be sure to provide a URL if the site already exists. And don't forget to provide your contact information.