My Graphic/Web Design History » Non-Profit

DanEllison.com (2010)

John — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:27:12 +0000

Following Dan’s success in his run for City Commission, I suggested we repurpose the campaign site and continue to use it for a conduit for communicating with the citizens of Helena. The campaign site received over 36.6k unique page views between July and December ‘09. I “realigned” the design from the campaign site using the same customized theme, updated the logo, and implemented it on the new domain.

As with the campaign site I continue to manage all aspects of this site, including content creation.

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.

Women’s Leadership Network (2006)

John — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:57:11 +0000

The client trusted my vision on the design of this site and cut me loose to explore many options. I’m gratified that they picked my favorite out of the bunch. The target demographic for the organization is professional women in the Helena area in the 20-50 age range. The theme uses an analogous color scheme with blues and greens, giving it a harmonious, professional look. This site is a combination of WordPress blogs (2) and static HTML pages. Two blogs were used to maintain a separation for the web site admins and the members, who are allowed to post their own announcements (this separation can now be accomplished with various plug-ins on a single WordPress installation).

WordPress was used for the Announcements page and the Event Information page. The rest is static HTML using the same design as the WordPress theme. Each member was given an account in the Announcements blog and that data was used to create the Member Directory and customize the Contact Information page. Small scripting enhancements were used to tie the site together, for example, PHP is used to grab the three newest entries in the Event Information blog and post them on the homepage. Finally, the Membership Application page was tied into Paypal allowing members to pay their dues via credit card, without creating a maintenance or administration nightmare for the client.

Treasure State Development Web Site (2004)

John — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:34:08 +0000

Treasure State Development was one of the few private sector web sites I did at Northrop Grumman. They were already a client of our Network department, and this was low budget follow-on work to that contract. The entire design was based on their logo, the woodcut in the upper left corner combined with the text in the masthead. I dissected it, pulling the colors out of it and other graphic elements such as the masthead background and bullets. I used a third-party javascript slider to make the menu bar at the top slide into place at the top no matter how much the user scrolled the page. I also used a third-party random quote script in the left sidebar. The site was constructed with semantic markup and entirely styled with cascading style sheets (CSS). No content management system was used, although the site was built upon a basic template structure using server-side includes (SSI) for common elements.

Apparently the site no longer exists. I never heard what became of the family-based company.

St. Peter’s Hospital (1998)

John — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:33:08 +0000

Comments forthcoming.