APR 2019 – WHAT HAVE I ACTUALLY BEEN DOING LATELY? …
Here’s a chunk of it:  tinyurl.com/DavidB-Music

SEP 2018 – THIS IS ALL PRETTY OUTDATED BY NOW, … a-a-nd, not sure how much of this I would phrase similarly, were I to be re-doing it today. In any case, all this stuff happened a few years back. Other stuff happened also, just not stuff that one would characterize as “Web and IT Consulting.”

I work closely with site owners, visual designers, and hosting providers to expand business value for site owners. All my recent web projects involve hand-coded custom HTML/CSS, graphics editing, and hosting/domain consultation.

• Ah Shayh Natural Skin Care
    Developed from scratch using WordPress, WPEC, GoldCart, and Authorize.net.
• Alive & Well Institute of Conscious Bodywork
    Continuing maintenance using custom CSS, JavaScript, Dreamweaver Templates.
• Healing Possibilities Santa Rosa
    Major rework of style and content, continuing maintenance using Intuit website builder application.
• Healus Center
    Major rework of style and content, continuing maintenance using custom CSS, JavaScript.
• Marin Treatment Center
    (work in progress) Developing from scratch using WordPress and a suitable premium theme.
• National Heirloom Exposition
    Continuing to maintain and enhance WordPress site using custom CSS, JavaScript.
  (I also maintain Facebook pages for The National Heirloom Expo, and Petaluma Seed Bank.)
• Serenity Sam
    Continuing maintenance using PrestaShop Back Office.
• Sonoma County Fellowship of Narcotics Anonymous
    Major rework of style and content, continuing maintenance using custom CSS, JavaScript, PHP, WordPress, Joomla!.
• Sonoma Valley Thunderchickens Fire Brigade
    Developed from scratch using GoDaddy Website Builder.
• Sports Massage By Mo
    Developed from scratch and continued maintenance using GoDaddy Website Builder.
• Valley of the Moon Home Cleaning & Organizing
    Developed from scratch, together with site owner, using WordPress.

I’m a coder with a background in instrumentation testing, database programming, object-oriented application development, and maintaining large complex legacy code-bases. Over the past year or so, I’ve made a foray into web development and maintenance projects for small business clients. I’ve been staying pretty busy, and I enjoy the work a lot!

Currently, my primary development tools are Dreamweaver, other Creative Suite apps, and WordPress. I use Dreamweaver primarily as an IDE. While glad to exploit advantages of awesome themes, cool plugins, and productivity-enhancing features of contemporary CMS platforms, I find little use for WYSIWYG-based code-generation tools like the WordPress Visual Editor. Under the hood, not only is “What You See” not always “What You Get”, but also “What You Get” need not be messy or quizzical to maintain. I’d rather write and test code myself, when clean code isn’t already provided.

I have a working understanding of content management, social media, web application and cloud concepts, software engineering best practices, core networking technologies, mobile connectivity, and security. I’m experienced with Windows and Linux platforms, databases, scripting and compiled languages. Currently I’m not doing any deep work in PHP and MySQL, jQuery, nor strict/transitional/HTML5 (mostly because it’s so easy to build functional and attractive sites using CMS tools), but I have no fear of any scripting or database facilities.

I’m having fun with using CSS, PHP, and plugins more these days, and using HTML tables less, wherever possible. I’m excited to begin soon, my first substantial project using Drupal. This will be a conversion of a fairly complex static-page site. I’m planning carefully to set up appropriate content types and fields, and to accomplish the conversion in a stepwise manner, rolling out updated sections of the site in parts for the user community to try out newly-presented familiar features and give their feedback. A primary objective is to provide a combined intranet/extranet environment wherein tiered access privileges on some features are controlled by login group membership – enabling the site to acquire a character of distributed maintenance, rather than having a single “webservant”.

Most recent update: May 2013