My Graphic/Web Design History » Campaign

Chase Hibbard (2000)

John — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:23:05 +0000

A mutual friend hired me to do a site for Chase’ 2000 campaign for Montana State Senate. I worked with Chase and his staff to assemble content for the site. The real treat was having access to professional photography by John Reddy. His work is amazing. In retrospect I wish I had done more with that source material. Unfortunately Chase didn’t win. And as with Anita’s site, I wasn’t able to acquire any stats regarding the traffic.

When I locate the original files I will update the screenshot with a better quality version.

Anita Varone (2000)

John — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:39:39 +0000

A mutual friend hired me to do a simple one-page site for Anita’s 2000 campaign for Lewis and Clark County Commissioner. I used her brochure as a jumping off point. I was paid one non-running 1987 Mazda 4×4 pickup. Unfortunately I didn’t save any stats for the site so I don’t know what her traffic level was. Also, when I find my original files I will update this screenshot with the full page site.

Ellison For City Commission (2009)

John — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:20:18 +0000

When a good friend of 10 years informed me he was running for Helena City Commission, naturally I jumped at the chance to help him out. This was a quick effort and I was able to implement this site very quickly and inexpensively.

I started by designing his logo (also used on business cards, brochures and other collateral items), incorporating it into a modified stock free theme called “Fusion” that Dan and his wife Jane picked out. I formatted the content and integrated the blog with his Twitter and Facebook accounts, coaching Dan on how and when to update each. When he created a commercial for local TV, I hosted it with Vimeo and pulled that into the site as well. I’m also performed various other administrative tasks like managing the domain(s) (9 of them, all variations), email accounts (through Google Accounts), keeping WordPress, the theme and plug-ins updated, and everything else behind the scenes having to do with the hosting (with Dreamhost.com). Nothing I did on the site required custom programming. I wanted to insure that it remained easy to update with WordPress’ automatic updating functionality for itself, the themes and the plug-ins.

The future of the site, now that he won one of the two available seats in the election, is to convert the site from WordPress to static HTML pages and keep it online as an archive of the campaign, at least while Dan serves out his term. I’ve molded this campaign web site into a new form, with new content and a new logo, at DanEllison.com.