Below are archived versions of a few websites that I’ve built over time, hosted on github pages. All code is available in repos on my github.
There are a millions of ways I’d love to change these websites. There are dozens of bad practices… not to mention some ugly code and bloated files. Updating them, however, would almost be dishonest - I want to keep them the way they are to show my personal journey. Nobody starts out making websites with all the best practices and it’s interesting to see the behavioral changes that I made over time. The code follows a Wordpress format as I used a Wordpress plugin to export them as packages to Github Pages.
Therefore, I’m keeping these websites the way they are. I do not see myself becoming a web programmer anyway, although it was extremely valuable to get some insight into the life of a web programmer. They are presented in the order they were built.
In 2014, I was offered to be a part of the Naab+Griggs campaign team, running for student body President/Vice President. The University of Cincinnati has about 45,000 students so their Student Government is large. Campaigning for the slate therefore requires a team of about 30 people and nice website. I took the offer, not only for the experience and fun, but because I believed these two guys to be great for the job.
This was my first anything web-related, first time using Javascript/HTML/CSS/etc. So… it’s honestly pretty bad code-wise. Not to mention the whole thing was made in about 2 weeks. I did not do any of the graphic design, all of that was done by the extremely talented Kate Davis, which is why it at least looks very pretty. I learned an extraordinary amount about both web design and working in a team, and I’m extremely thankful for this experience.
Also, we won!
The next year, I was offered again to be a part of the Phelps+Duncan campaign team, and I again joined as I really supported these two personally.
This time around, we really crushed it. We had some excellent, excellent people in charge of marketing/design and had a hilarious video go viral.
There were many learnings I took from the previous experience and applied to this one, and I’m much happier with the result (we spent 3 weeks on it this time around). I got into some JQuery here and started to see web design from a bit more perspective. Once again, all of the design was not done by myself but the extraordinarily talented Meghan Eleniak and I’m super thankful I got to be a part of the team.
We won this time as well!
A side note - I was offered to be on some campaign teams the following couple years, but honestly, it just never came at the right time. While I supported the people who asked me to be on their teams, I got involved in other projects or internships. Plus, campaigns come with a lot of drama. There were a wealth of people in CS dying for experience so this chapter of my life came to a close.
Now that I had some web experience and my name was out there, I got some offers for external work. This website was part of Next Lives Here, a summit and then ongoing project in the city of Cincinnati.
For some context, I was brought on board after some people had already made parts of the site (I think using some kind of framework). My job was not to start from the ground-up but to build from there.
This time, I learned/used Bootstrap as it fit the design and feel of the site perfectly. I loved getting the experience of working on a website that was outside the bubble of my University. If a campaign website looks bad, well, it was made by a student, so no worries. Stakes were higher this time around.
I am pretty happy with the result!
And this is it - I get to apply everything I’ve learned. After the summit site, I was asked to make a prototype site for the project itself. I got to build it from the ground-up.
This experience was fantastic. I used Wordpress and created a fully custom template for the website. I made this decision so that it could be updated, directly through Wordpress using blog posts as new sections of the site, without any code from the end of people on the team.
This meant a lot of PHP, which I had some experience with, and then Bootstrap for the frontend. I’m really proud of the site. It’s easy to use from the Wordpress side and looks great. It doesn’t have a lot of content because I believe NLH hired full-time web devs for their cause (it’s hard to depend on a student for a project like this), but I learned a ton and got a small taste of making bigger design decisions for websites.