Web Design
The Internet is everywhere, so a business today must keep a professional online presence. To this end, it's important for a well rounded IT professional to be skilled in Web design and development.
Overview
It would be my pleasure create and maintain a simple small business site myself or redesign and maintain a larger complex site as part of a team of Web professionals. I created this site as an example of what I can do. The following is a breakdown of some of the technologies featured in this design as well as others I am familiar with.
Web Standards
I designed this Web site using clean, validated HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to ensure that it is compliant with current Web standards, flexible, and accessible for as many users as possible. Adhering to these professional design practices makes the content available and enjoyable for people with differing needs and preferences. The user can adjust his or her experience as they wish.
JavaScript
You may have noticed the scrolling images on the main page. This effect mimics a Flash animation, but is actually a JavaScript/AJAX program that I found and adapted for this site. JavaScript is a popular client side technology that can be used in many applications. In fact, I also use it to validate elements of the contact form and spell check the user's input (another excellent found script that utilizes Google's spell check tools).
PHP Processing
PHP is a server side technology that I really like because it is powerful, versatile, and works with both Windows and Linux servers. PHP is preprocessed so the client never sees the code. This is great for security and cross-browser compatibility as it delivers simple HTML results. I used it on this site to email the contact form information.
Drupal & WordPress
Creating a Web site from scratch is a great way to improve one's skills as a programmer and graphic designer. However, it is often an impractical project that can take time to build. Depending on how the site is designed, it can also be difficult to update regularly. Luckily, there are some great resources available that make creating and maintaining a professional, standards-based Web site much easier. Two that I find particularly well suited for small to mid-size businesses are Drupal and WordPress.
Drupal is a content management system that once installed on the server takes care of the programming and basic design of the site. It allows the user to focus on customizing the look and adding content right away. WordPress is similar in that it takes care of the programming for you and offers customizable templates, but is more oriented to blogging. Both technologies are open source and I would be happy to work with them to create or maintain your site.
Mobile Web Design
After building this site for the big screen, I adapted it for mobile device browsers in two scaled-down versions. The first port, http://www.andrewminutillo.com/m, is composed of validated xhtml basic source code and css styling so it has the look of the full web page with an interface optimized for the smart phone experience.
The second port, http://www.andrewminutillo.com/m2, contains only xhtml for users of phones with smaller screens and/or incompatibility with style sheets. Please feel free to check out these mobile sites on your web-enabled phone.
Although not featured on this site, I have some familiarity with other popular Web programming languages including JAVA, ASP, and MySQL. Likewise, I am open to learning new technologies.
