About Phil
After graduating with a diploma in Audio/Video Graphics, I spent 10 years in the newspaper industry as an Advertising Designer and Production Manager. I left that industry to pursue web design/development and contracted work for a few different Web Developers, and my own clients. Web Development includes front-end design, animated banners, email campaigns, WordPress customization, technical troubleshooting, and training clients to use social media and update their own websites with Content Management Systems.
I'm competent with:
HTML, CSS, image and layout optimization
Favourite tools of the trade:
Photoshop, Dreamweaver, 'bare bones' text editor, Illustrator
The long version ...
My education and work experience has been computer graphics, Marketing, Advertising, publishing, and digital design. After graduating from the Audio-Video Graphics Communication program at Sir Sanford Fleming, my first job was as a Typesetter at a publishing company in Peterborough, Ontario. Working with 7 people in my department, we produced 4 weekly papers and a number of monthlies and other newsprint publications. It was a combination of digital advertising design and old-school cut-and-paste. It feels like a lifetime ago now.
About 1993 I started reading about the "information superhighway" in trade magazines. At that time I was a Production Manager and part of my job was to keep up with technology –whether or not head office would actually implement something new was another story. Over the course of the next few years I read a lot more, took nightschool courses in web page authoring, surfed, and dissected websites to see how it was done. A whole new world of publishing opened up to me and the best part was I was already comfortable with the tools to produce the graphics (Photoshop and Illustrator). Lynda.com taught me about colour (the browser-safe palette) and how to optimize images for web. Back then a 56k dialup modem was high technology and if you couldn't get your page to display in 15 seconds or less, you lost your viewer. More on that later.
My philosophy is that every project should convey a message to influence, inspire, or act At my full-time job I'd actually talked my boss in to putting up a sales and information website. It went online September 1995 and was designed more for customers (contacts, hours, location), Ad Agencies (mechanical and digital requirements), and potential flyer distribution clients (where we deliver and how to buy distribution). When I called head office to see if we could get hosting, the IT people there were really interested in a pilot project to see if we could sell online classifieds. We figured out a way to upsell classifieds and repurpose the content for web. I won't go into the details but it involved a mainframe, a text file on a floppy disk, text editing on a Mac, and FTP software. We didn't make buckets of money selling online ads, but it more than paid for itself in the extra revenue generated with one additional click. I learned A LOT of technical stuff that year and I got the bug for web design.
By 1998 I started contracting web work (websites and animated GIF banners) on the side. Business built steadily and after a year I had to make the decision: stay at a salaried job with benefits, or do web design. I talked to my boss on a Monday morning, thought about it for 2 days, and then quit that week. My wife thought I was insane. For a time I thought I was insane. But it was SO rewarding.
I spent a few years working for a web development company in Belleville, Ontario. It's been one of the best experiences. The office was a mix of Windows, Mac, and Unix. Networking was incredibly fast. Since then it seems like I've had to learn in leaps and bounds. That's what this business is like – you learn new things all the time. Now that mobil devices are coming on strong, it's coming back full circle. Images need to be optimized; the user might not have a strong connection or 4g speeds, and users are much more impatient than they were in the days of dialup.
About this site
This is my first real attempt at Responsive Web Design (RWD). If you don't know what that means it's easily readable and accessible on a smart phone, tablet, desktop computer, and who knows what in the future. Coding and images are optimized for fast page loads and less server requests. I also decided that a mobil first strategy was in order. It's forced me to focus on:
- content: what's really important
- getting out of the 'fixed size' layout mode I've been doing for a long time
- flexible ways to present content knowing that potential clients have different sized screens with different capabilities
Why mobile first?
Web users are increasingly using hand-held devices:
- Overall mobile traffic statistics have doubled every year for the last few years.
- Smart-phone sales have already outpaced PC sales. Not surprising considering they're getting less expensive and manufacturers are flooding the market.
- A significant percentage of mobil web users will use only their phone, but a higher percentage will use a desktop in one location, and switch to a phone or tablet somewhere else.
