Over the years it’s been my occasional privilege to build websites for friends and acquaintances, in my spare time. Sometimes I’ve done it for love, sometimes I’ve bartered my work for their work, and sometimes I’ve done it for money.
LifeRing.org (originally www.unhooked.com) was my first website. I started unhooked.com in June 1996 knowing next to nothing about writing html code. Then I moved into MS Front Page, and it kept growing and growing like a kudzu vine. By 2009 it had got so big and disorganized that radical surgery was necessary. As one of my last projects before retiring as CEO of LifeRing and handing the site over to fresh forces, I rebuilt the site from the ground up in WordPress.
Three of my favorite web projects are artist sites. Here I got to combine web design with my photography hobby, taking photos of some of the artwork.
The web site of artist Gillian Ellenby was a particular challenge to photograph because many of her works use glass and mirrors. We settled on a black background for this site to highlight the reflective brilliance of many of the objects. Since this site was mounted, Ellenby has created a body of exquisite new work that needs to be added to the site, one of these days.
Artist Patricia Dreher is very much in demand for her floorcloths, an ancient decorative art made practical for modern homes by the use of tough and ecologically friendly lacquers. Dreher is a protean artist. Her brushes can do anything. She can emulate terrazzo tile, Navajo blankets, Persian rugs, Japanese screens, you name it. She’s at home in any culture and any historical period. When she’s not performing flootcloth commissions for high-end homes and commercial establishments, she paints luminous landscapes and seascapes. Like the gillianellenby.com website, patriciadreher.com was done in Front Page, which means a ton of hand-coded links and backlinks. Today I would do it in a CMS like Drupal and save hours of labor.
Justyna Wilmore is a Polish-born artist who quickly found a following in Marin County and elsewhere with her bold, vivid figures in oil and watercolors. I built this site by adapting a javascript formula borrowed from a public-domain java web site. This site uses mouse-over techniques to display large images from thumbnails.
Khadafy Washington was a client of mine in a tenant-landlord case. He was a star football player at McClymonds High School in Oakland. On Aug. 4, 2000, he was shot and killed in the schoolyard while riding his bicycle. His mother, Marilyn Washington Harris, launched the Khadafy Foundation for Non-Violence in his memory and to help other parents and friends of young people who are victims of violence. I put together the original web site for the foundation. Since then, another web design volunteer stepped forward and pulled the site design to a higher level.
Sheila Jordan is the name of a famous jazz singer, but here in Alameda County California it’s the name of the county Superintendent of Schools. I had the privilege of helping to manage her hotly contested re-election campaign in 2006, and I built and maintained her campaign web site. Sheila won the race by a whopping 62.7 per cent. A year later, I had the honor of becoming Sheila’s husband. Sheila ran again in 2010, this time unopposed. The site has been scaled down from its red-hot campaign mode and will gradually evolve into Sheila’s personal and family website.
Just to show I’m not Drupal-bound, I built a web site for the dynamic young political consultant Pam Bachilla in Joomla. After doing the basic setup, I was able to show Bachilla how to load her own content — she’s a quick study — so that she doesn’t need to rely on a web consultant to keep the site updated. The ability for the end user to D.I.Y. is one of the big pluses of many CMS.
