• Key Services
  • Complete Websites
  • Writing and Editing
  • Custom Programming
  • Visual Design
  • SLR Photography
• Other Helpful Stuff
  • Audio/Video
  • Hosting, Domains, Email
  • Standards Compliance
  • Logos and Branding
  • Online Marketing
• My Portfolio
  • Highlights
  • Comprehensive
  • Testimonials
• Client Resources
  • Choosing a Designer
  • Your Role in the Process
  • Content Management
  • Tutorials and Training
  • Ongoing Support
• Connect With Us
  • Send an Email
  • Meet the Webmaster
  • Packages and Rates
  • Company Resources

A good website can create real connections between you and your audience. With attractive and tasteful design, well-written content, and clean standards-compliant programming, your site can become a launching point for success in all your enterprises.

As an independent web designer, I strive to help artists, community activists, and entrepreneurs make connections through the web. I can help you establish a web presence from the ground up, or enhance an existing site's appearance and function to bring it to a larger audience. I also do freelance work in visual design, photography, content production and code development.

My portfolio will display my past work, and the overview of services will begin to explain what I can do for you. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, requests for proposals, or invitations to play squash. I look forward to hearing from you!

Websites from Start to Finish

The web is a medium with enormous potential. Words, images, audio and video are all traditional media that can be expressed in an integrated way on the web. This expression leads to communication - between customers and entrepreneurs, between patrons and artists, and between creative people and their peers.

Good websites, no matter how sophisticated, must have interesting content. Part of my role as a web designer is to help you organize and generate content - the words, images, and interactivity that you want your audience to experience - and express it a way that effectively reaches your audience. Editing and proofreading, professional photography, and multimedia production are all important parts of this process.

An attractive visual design will make your site a pleasure to visit, and keep your audience coming back. I work hard to create the highly navigable layouts, tasteful colour schemes, beautiful images and branding material that will make your site stand out from the crowd.

No site could succeed without lightweight and elegant code. I follow the latest W3C standards to guarantee accessibility, whether your audience uses a smartphone or a text-only browser with scripting disabled. I can also create custom programming to teach your site some new tricks, and implement the latest in web apps or CMS software.

Since no site is an island, it's important to have an effective strategy for attracting traffic. I design with search engine optimization in mind, and connect you with the latest in social networking tools. I also refine design and content in order to transform viewers into participants, leading to increased sales, stimulating dialogue, and creative collaboration.

I also provide fast and spacious hosting and ongoing support to all my clients. For those who wish to manage their own sites, I offer tutorials and training; for those who don't, I continue to make myself available for updates after the completion of a site.

All of this put together equals a high-quality site at a great value. It'll run like a well-oiled machine, feel like a sunny day at the beach, and bring people together like a top-notch dinner party. For more details on my services, you can explore this site, and if you'd like to contact me, please feel welcome.

Writing and Editing

Even in this age of microblogs and multimedia, there's no escaping the need for well-written prose. High-quality written copy gives an immediate impression of professionalism, and typos or grammar mistakes do the opposite!

My writing services begin by uncovering your essential message; by tightly zooming in on your content and expressing it with economy and clarity. Wasted words, like ore in a gold mine, are refined away until the paragraph shines. The goal is what Hemingway called "transparent prose": graceful passages that let your reader see the meaning beneath as clearly as possible.

I also customize prose to reach your audience. The tone of the writing, whether it's friendly and informal or professionally dignified, must be appropriate to the type of reader you want to attract. If it's specific to a profession or pastime, it should be accessible to the newcomers and novel to the experts. More engaged readers translate into more interest, greater sales, and more effective communication.

Creating scannable text is especially important on the web, where readers move very quickly unless you draw them in. By using clear titles and emphasizing select passages, I make it easy for the reader to find what they're looking for with minimal time investment, and that keeps them looking at your site instead of someone else's.

With a designer's eye for layout and typography, I make online media easy on the eyes. Readers shouldn't have to search for the right line after a too-wide row of text, or watch your layout crumble when they adjust the text size; and with my designs, they won't have to. Attractive fonts are the icing on the cake.

Quality writing is an essential part of a successful web design strategy, and my writing services are also available for print media. Samples are available throughout this site and also at BlueScreenLife.com. If you'd like someone to re-articulate your content, or just provide some highly effective proofreading, you've come to the right place!

Custom Programming

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Visual Design

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SLR Photography

Not to mention scanning and retouching.

Audio/Video

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Hosting, Domains, Email

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Standards Compliance

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Logo and Branding

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Online Marketing

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Highlights

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Testimonials

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Your Role in the Process

I'll be writing more details here shortly. For now, here are some helpful hints:

Know your business.

Communicate your tastes.

Gather your content.

Learn some web jargon.

Choose a designer.

Work together.

Choosing a Web Designer

When you're ready to go online, you need someone with the skills to make it happen. One of your first decisions will be whether to hire a professional, use a template, or create the site yourself. Each option has its pros and cons, some of which I've listed below.

If you decide to create the site yourself, I can offer you tutorials and training; if you'd like to use a template, WordPress is one of the better ones. If you're planning to hire a professional, you have an important decision to make; I'll be writing some tips on that here in the near future.

Content Management

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Tutorials and Training

Uploading & downloading files
1. You'll need to download and install the Firefox Browser. Think of it as a more secure, highly customizable upgrade to Internet Explorer.
2. FireFTP is a free Firefox add-on that'll let you upload and download files. Download FireFTP and install it to your hard drive.
3. Know that any file you overwrite will be lost forever, and be very careful not to overwrite a perfectly good file with an older version or one with errors. Clients should read the section on "Use of FTP" in their contracts.
4. Launch FireFTP from the Tools menu in Firefox.
5. Click the drop-down menu on the top left of the FireFTP screen.
4. Select "Create new account" and enter whatever account name you like.
6. The "host name" is ftp.hilltoptutoring.com.
7. The login name and password will have been given to you by email. If you've had a good look and can't find them, email your webmaster.
8. Click "OK", select your account name from the drop-down menu and hit "Connect".
9. The left side is your computer; the right side is the server for the website.
10. Navigate both sides and click the right arrow to upload files, the left arrow to download them.

Key Vocabulary for Interwebbing
Browser - the program a web surfer uses to view your website. Some examples are Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome.
Server - a computer that stores your website data and makes it available to web surfers worldwide. This is a high-performance, secure computer located in a dedicated data centre.
FTP - "file transfer protocol", an efficient way to download and upload files from your server. If you're sending large files to your web designer, we recommended using FTP rather than email. Mozilla provides a free FTP program called FireFTP, and this page offers instructions on using it.
Domain Name - the online location or URL of your website, for example www.hilltoptutoring.com. In order for a domain name to function, it has to be registered with a central authority - a registrar - that will direct web surfers to the server that holds your data. Registration carries an annual fee.
Host - the company that stores your server, and also charges an annual fee for that service. Hilltop's sites are hosted by a third party: A2 Hosting.

Batch Resizing Images in Photoshop
1. Gather all the images you want to resize into one folder.
2. Create an empty folder to hold the eventual resized images.
3. In Photoshop, click File > Automate > Web Photo Gallery.
4. From the Web Photo Gallery menu, select "Options: Large Images".
5. Set the source folder to the images' location, and the destination folder to your empty folder.
6. Choose your jpeg quality; I find that 7 is a good balance between image quality and loading speed.
7. Set the height to your desired height and check "constrain:height".
8. Click "OK" and find the new thumbnails in the destination folder in an "images" subfolder.
9. Gather the vertical images and put them somewhere safe.
10. Repeat steps 7 through 9 using width instead of height.
11. Gather the horizontal images to your safe place, ready for uploading.

Ongoing Support

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Contact Us!

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Meet the Webmaster

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Packages and Rates

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Company Resources

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Portfolio (Comprehensive)

The Story: The Parkas are an Ontario-based rock band who had lost their domain name and site content while on hiatus. I recovered their text content from the Internet Archive, and negotiated the return of their domain name. I then customized an open-source Flash music player, captured several videos directly from a DVD, and integrated this multimedia into a brand new site design. See the result at www.theparkas.com.

Key Features:
Integrated audio and video
Standards-compliant HTML and CSS
Client-driven colour scheme
Shaded backgrounds for visual depth

Launched in June 2009.

The Story: I began this site, my latest, with some 'copy work' - i.e. setting up a DSLR camera to photograph Joan's paintings. Once that was done, I programmed a photo gallery with three integrated methods of navigation, and created a simple and colour-free visual design to keep the focus squarely on the art.

Launched in May 2009.

The Story: D'Vision is the business name of Dean Landry, a talented wedding and fashion photographer based in the K-W area. While Dean provided the visual design, I used Javascript and Perl to program his online portfolio, a complex eproofing system with client authentication, and a custom-built content management system to let him add new clients and update his portfolio.

The Story: Willow Creek is an organic farm located in Erin that grows heirloom vegetables and herbs, primarily for the Milton Farmer's Market. After meeting one of their farmers and discovering a mutual concern for the future of agriculture in Canada, and a shared appreciation for fresh and healthy food, I agreed to design and host their site in exchange for a share of the season's harvest. It was delicious, and they liked the site too!

The Story: CanTRA is a national charity, based in Guelph, which promotes the physical and psychological benefits of horseback riding for the disabled. For the CanTRA website, I used an established colour scheme and content to re-create a fully functional and aesthetically pleasing site. Notable pages include the centre locator map and the stallion service auction page, which includes a custom-built Perl program that runs the annual live auction.

The Story: Blue Screen Life is a catch-all site for my personal creative work: writing, photography and life experience. With this site, I aimed to create a wide variety of high-quality, interesting content, and to draw traffic and ad revenue through the use of Google AdSense and Search Engine Optimization.