Mac-1 Construction is a home builder in Arizona. Don’t remember how I got this job, I hardly remember even doing it. But there it is. And the same website I built in 2007 is running today, so I guess that says something about how happy they were with my work. Even though I don’t think I’ve spoken to them since.
The Burgh Live is the name of my hosting company. I built them a website back in 2007 that included a logo design. Clean and simple, gets the job done.
Between 2004 and 2011, I worked at Vocollect as the in-house intranet manager. And so during that time, I had the opportunity to design and develop my own intranet and content management system in PHP and MySQL. Authentication tied in to Active Directory, and features included message boards, events, employee profiles, page hierarchies, HR forms, events & education registrations, featured employees, and much more. It was such a complete product I had considered reselling it to other companies under the name Intrabreeze.
Back when GPS in vehicles was the new rage, I had a client that wanted to track fleets of vehicles using the new technology. Since we didn’t have any photos of trucks or the device in action, I had to resort to a “space-age” technology design.
While living in the Holiday Park Apartments after graduation, I bartered a membership from the health club down the road in exchange for developing and maintaining a website for them. It was a nice little gym with racquetball courts – which is super fun if you’ve never played. The gym has since closed.
During my two years as an in-house developer at Kennametal, I was given the opportunity to redesign and rebuild the website for the Kennametal Industrial Product Group. Lots of text and drill bits. Not a particularly glamourous subject matter, but noble work nonetheless. And hey, it was 2003 and I had a job. Go me!
Kennametal was my first job out of college and I learned a lot about corporate life during my time there, namely that I dont’ like corporate life. But aside from that, I learned a lot. I was part of a team that created on e-commerce portal that had over 300,000 products, worked with marketing team to transform their print materials into web, and was also allowed to redesign the corporate site to this sweet blue and yellow table-based layout design. Sorry the screen shot is all I could get from archive.org.
The Big Dog Dart League was my second client, and I created the site and also managed schedules and rosters. But my favorite part of this site was the Big Dog logo that I created, a cigar smoking strongman bulldog. It was the first time I thought I might have some actual design chops. Even 20 years later, I still see that logo on vending machines around Pittsburgh and it makes me happy every time.
In 2000, a few friends of mine formed a girl-pop band named Trilogy in the mold of Destiny’s Child and recorded a demo, and I built them a website for free because I was 20 and they were girls. The band was short-lived, I don’t think it made it through the summer but I did date one of the girls for a couple months. Though it was the first time I used Photoshop to make a logo, so there’s that!
National Sports Challenge was my first paid client job. I was 19 years old and I was paid about $250 to build it. NSC was a Madden 2000 tournament, E-sports way ahead of its time. Not only did I build the website, but I helped the guy running it to set up 64 40-inch CRT TVs and Playstations in a hotel conference room. Despite widespread radio ads, turout was much lower than expected. But to just have someone pay me to build a website was exciting.