Web Design Portfolio

Let’s not kid ourselves: I’m not really a web designer. I don’t have the full range of knowledge and skills to call myself that: I hack around with XHTML, CSS and PHP, and do well enough, but I lack any graphic design training, have only limited JavaScript, know next to nothing about IIS (and prefer to keep it that way), and have no experience with databases. There are literally thousands of people who are better at this than I am.

Still, since I’ve been mucking about with web pages since February 1996, when the first version of my personal home page went live, I’ve accumulated something of a minor design portfolio. This page offers a few of the highlights.

In general, though, I’m more comfortable calling myself a web writer than a web designer — I’m very good at creating content for the web; the page’s design has been a secondary but necessary step. Fortunately, people seem to like my designs anyway.

Whether through lack of skills or deliberate choices on my part, the web sites I’ve designed have tended to highlight the following:

From day one I’ve been using text editors to compose my code directly; the WYSIWYG editors available in 1996 were generally poor at the time, and I never came around. Also, because this has always been more of a hobby on the side than anything else, I haven’t used serious — and expensive — modern design tools like Dreamweaver. As a result I’ve relied on PHP for dynamic template building, and have run into trouble when coding for a environment that only accepted static HTML pages.

I currently use XHTML 1.0-Transitional — or at least that’s what I aspire to.

Selected Sites

You can already see the results of my dubious handiwork here at mcwetboy.com, which is in a near-constant state of revision. Here are a few other major web projects of note:

Gartersnake.info (2004-     )
A massive site for amateur garter snake enthusiasts that makes heavy use of PHP templates to process data (regional and species) into consistent tables, among other things.
The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps (2003-     )
This blog, which uses PHP and CSS for its templates, was powered by Blogger in 2003 and moved to Movable Type in January 2004. The design was meant to evoke the colours and font styles of old hardbound atlases, relief maps and topographical maps.
Ontario Herpers (2003 -     )
Still under development, Ontario Herpers is a PHP-based site the purpose of which is to host web pages for non-profit amateur herpetological and herpetocultural activities in Ontario. It includes Pelee Island Field Trips, which uses homegrown PHP-based photo galleries, among other things. Heavy use of CSS-based design here.
Ottawa Amphibian and Reptile Association (2000-2003)
The home page of the Ottawa Amphibian and Reptile Association. Done gratis some time ago — I’m a past president of the club — this began as a static page but evolved to a PHP-based site that includes a blog with the latest club news. The main purpose of the site was to provide basic information about the club, which had little to no web presence prior to my work.
Sciensational Sssnakes!! (2000-     )
An ongoing project, this is the home page for a reptile-education company based in Orillia, Ontario. Since their hosting company does not offer server-side scripting, it’s been a challenge to maintain a consistent site design without resorting to PHP or somesuch. A simple design, style sheets, and a JavaScript-based main menu have been my workarounds of choice. The one project listed here where I had a client whose design ideas influenced the final result.

Visit my projects section for a full list of my online activities, not all of which have a major web design element.