Vermont Highland Cattle was one of my first clients at Vance Wright Adams. It got off to a rocky start as I misspelled the client’s last name numerous times in a press release due to an aggressive spell checker in my IDE. We made it through that though and over the next few years kept improving on the site, primarily their custom shopping cart system built in the PHP framework, CodeIgniter.
I contracted with JLM Pacific Epoch for roughly 2 years. They maintained a database of all companies and executives operating in China. The database was a complete mess so my role was to take all of that data and make it something that people could read, browse, and click around in. They’re plan was to sell U.S. businesspeople access to this database. I eventually handed the project off to a full-time employee they hired.
I’m can’t even remember how I managed to get the Andy Russell Charitable Foundation as a client, but it was many years ago as this was the second iteration of website! The organization simply needed a website to promote their annual golf outing and publish all of the great auction items for each year’s event.
HPW Associates needed a clean website design to promote their business consulting services. I created a nice looking site on Wordpress so they could manage it on their own. I’m still not 100% sure what they do, I know it has something to do with business performance measurement and analytics. But they’re happy with their site!
I began working with ProTech back in 2007 when the company really needed some help with their online presence, particularly the brand presence on their website and access to search courses. Forced to work with nightly data exports from an archaic FoxPro database, we created a website that was able to publish all scheduled courses in all cities and allow interested students to register an account and sign up for courses.
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.
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.
In 1997, me and a friend launched the WWF Action Zone, a website dedicated to covering the WWF pro wrestling and it became an instant success. Within a year we relaunched the site as Top-Rope.com and continued to run the site for 4 years through college allowing us to travel around the country for wrestling shows. It was an amazing learning experience that set the stage for a long and rewarding career.