The following represents best work I've done in design and development. I've recently worked with people who have sparked my interest in standards, accesibility, and semantics, causing me to enter a new stage of my website work.

 

Environmental Affairs Board

The Environmental Affairs Board (EAB) at the University of California, Santa Barbara needed a website that could present a large amount of information to its many current and future users. This was a volunteer project which I coordinated with my brother, the president of the EAB. He developed the structure of the site based on his knowledge of the audiences who would find their way to the site and his understanding of the information that needed to be conveyed. I implemented the website using the open source content management system Mambo. Such an implementation has allowed the site to continue to grow in content after my brother and I have both moved on from working with the organization.

I chose to give the site a very open and clean feeling by using a full width layout with good use of whitespace. The strong colors of the header and menu ensure the user is always aware of his or her place in the website and has an idea of where to go next. The menu system allows for a very large amount of information to be organized in a straighforward and effective manner.

Ignacio Rotary Monte Carlo Night

The Rotary Club of Ignacio needed a simple, elegant, effective website to act as a brochure for their 2007 fundraiser Monte Carlo Night. Though I generally do not advocate the use of splash pages, this website worked well with the one that I developed, providing all the general event details in a very quick manner on the front page. True to my style, the site represents a very simple way to convey the information about the event. For the few weeks preceding the event, the site was also able to handle event registration via an online interface.

UCSC Student Volunteer Center

The Student Volunteer Center (SVC) at the University of California, Santa Cruz needed a website that would convey the message that the organization is successful, active, and hard working. The old website fell short in many respects and didn't properly represent the uniqueness of the organization.

The website is a place for students and organizations alike to learn about how to get involved with the SVC. In the redesign of the site we worked to create a very straightforward and appropriate menu system with adequate instructions on how to get involved depending on the type of user visiting the site.

The menus in the site are strictly are run by javascript and styled by css. The source code can be found at Dynamic Drive. This is the first and only site in which I have implemented such a menu system. I find it very elegant for design but ultimately destrutive for usability because it takes away the user's ability to always see the sub-pages in the current section of the site.

This was a very long and ongoing project which included a hefty amount of maintenance and updates. I was tasked with creating a page for one of the featured organization of the SVC which turned out to be Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Santa Cruz County. The page was a lot of fun to design and takes on a sort of magazine type layout. That page can be found on the site here.

Brian McGovern Art

Brian McGovern Art is a portfolio website to display the works of my half brother and sister's late father. I designed and coded the site about six years ago when I was first getting into web design and development. Because it hasn't been updated since, it is admittedly poorly coded and not very well exectued. I've opted to include it here in this portfolio because the site is very representative of my design skill.