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Overview

 

Most of my work these days is in the social aspect of a project, communicating with you and anyone else involved to get enough clarity about what you want to start taking steps to get an effective web infrastructure up & running. Some of how I think about this:

  • Get clear about what you really want - what you're hoping to accomplish overall, who the intended audience is. Usually even when someone has a clear plan, I'm able to find things you hadn't thought of that make it better. Further, the plan usually needs to change as we get into actually implementing things, so getting clarity usually includes trying some things out to see how they work.
  • What are the available resources? - People (connection to the subject of the website, expertise in tech and design, etc), time, servers/services, art, money, etc.
  • Scope, order and pacing - For projects with many parts to them, how much of it is clear enough to map out as a first chunk? What comes first and what can be done later? How quickly do we want to proceed and what kind of feedback or experience do we want from each part of the work before continuing to later stages?
  • Exploring what options exist and which tools would be the best fit:
    • Are you just publishing information, or do you want people coming to the site to participate? (And if so, how much and in what ways?)
    • What tools to use - WordPress? Drupal? Squarespace et al?
    • Free vs. paid hosting options.
    • The spectrum from using a web service to running software on your own Internet host or hardware.
    • Whether and how to use Facebook, Twitter and related technologies?

 

In addition to joining people in planning and developing their website (and use of online resources generally), I've built some websites using WordPress, and Wagn - a web development system I help to create. I have also used Drupal and a number of other systems, and I can pick up new technologies very quickly. I am not a great graphic designer but can usually come up with something serviceable. I know (pre-5) HTML pretty well, and am familiar with the basics of CSS. I have not coded recently; the last languages I used seriously (some years ago) were Python and Perl, and I have edited PHP scripts more than once.

 

Contact me about how we can work together:

John Abbe

johnca@ourpla.net

617-678-3155

1680 Walnut Street

Eugene, OR 97403