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Portland waterfront Abandoned railroad bridge

DECOSTERdesign

Web design and development personalized for your project. Whether it's a simple update or full-blown ground up rebuild, I've honed my process to build what you need, when you need it.

About MeMy Work

About Me

I Create Awesome Stuff

Located in sunny Portland, Oregon. Portland is a great town full of creative energy, great places to eat and amazing scenery and landscapes. Being in Portland allows me to surround myself with amazing people, hot new technologies and awesome companies to work with. View my resume

Design

The possibilities are limitless. By working together we can create a beautiful, functional website that works as well as it looks. Using modern tools and nearly two decades of experience the design process feeds the development uniting form and function into a site that will get you noticed.

Development

Translating your design from paper to pixels is challenging. It's more than just a few lines of code and my process is a mixture of craft and code, mixing functionality and usability into a standards oriented framework based on solid tools and modern coding practices.

Support

Just because it's built; doesn't mean it's done. Taking the time to set up and implement analytics, marketing and SEO is an essential part of the project. I always make sure that the site tells you what you need to know to make sure it's working for you; the way you need it to.

My Skills

Getting the job done.

This is where the magic happens; I live in the front-end. Whether the project is a simple business-card site or a complex dynamic portfolio site built with Wordpress as the CMS you won't get very far if your foundation is poorly built. Using semantic, standards oriented practices allows me to build a functional, high quality foundation for your site - this creates a solid base to build and expand your site and is a part of every project I undertake.

CSS is what makes your site beautiful, but just like the HTML foundation, it's important to write clean and valid code for the style framework to display the design. With HTML5 being the standard to build the markup for the site, CSS3 is the standard I use to make it look amazing. Coding the styles using SaaS allows me to create complex, functional and valid styles that are compiled into a sussinct visual language that defines the design.

JavaScript is the third tool in my box and allows me to create simple animations and complex alterations to the code that create an interactive experience that compliments the design and works across all browsers, platforms and operating systems. jQuery is my framework of choice for its versatility and lightweight. Mixing vanilla JavaScript and jQuery gives me the versatility to implement just about anything you can imagine quickly and reliably that just simply works.

PHP is the workhorse behind a lot of the projects I have built over the years and is the framework that runs Wordpress. Using PHP allows for server-side additions to sites to run things like contact forms quickly and securely. Since PHP is so widely used you don't have to worry about having some fancy or expensive hosting service for your site to work, it also means you have the means to run operations on the server, away from the client which means it's secure and completely independant of the browser.

Wordpess is the most popular blogging platform in the world. Running a Wordpress site allows you to have a secure option for editing the content on your site without having to worry about knowing any code at all. But it's for blogging, right? While Wordpress started its life as a blogging platform it has evolved into one of the most versatile CMS platforms. And it's free! Running Wordpress opens up a world of options for your site and allows me to create a full-featured database driven site without the "Enterprise" cost.

Once the site is built, doesn't mean that the work is over. Now that you have a great site showcasing your company or portfolio you have to be able to get people to your site and this means SEO. Optimizing your site to be indexed properly and accurately by Google, Bing and others is just as important as the design, and with over a dozen years of experience I can help you get your site noticed.

I have a degree in fine art photography and more than 20 years experience photographing people, products and locations using a wide array of cameras. This also means I have just as much experience editing those photographs. Whether you need to have some dust cleaned up or hordes of people removed from a scene, I can edit and retouch your images to suit your needs, or go out and shoot new images.

UxD
HTML
Sass/CSS
JavaScript
Wordpress
GRAV
SEO
Analytics
Photoshop
Sketch
Illustrator
Photography

Process Makes Perfect

Everything has its place, but well placed chaos can lead to amazingly creative results. I build with a systematic creative process that balances my type A side with my right brain, feeding both sides allows me to build a method into the creative madness of design.

Design

Designing web interfaces, applications and sites for the last 20 years gives me the experience to go deeper than the latest fad.

Coding

Front-end, back-end, JavaScript, PHP or Sass - I've got you covered from simple interactions to complex CMS driven sites.

Experience

I've been doing this since AOL ruled the world which gives me the chops to build the right solution the first time.

Accessibility

What's the point of having a top-notch site if people can't view it? Responsive & accessible; built into every project.