Starting as a personal interest, and developing through volunteer work and academic assignments, I find Web page design and development to be fascinating and addictive. From my earliest outings (hand-coding school PTO pages in self-taught HTML) I have increased my knowledge and skills to become proficient in XHTML and CSS. I have enough knowledge of JavaScript to get myself in and out of trouble and have enjoyed writing some basic scripts (and enjoyed them even more when they work!). I’m enjoying exploring using WordPress as a CMS for this site. I’ve had a few disasters, but I’ve recovered from them all and learned something in the process. 
Representative Projects:
knit one, find one
Originally developed in the Fall semester of 2009 as a final project for IS7370, Intermediate Web Development, knit one, find one, a knitting pathfinder was intended to display XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills learned and extended during the semester. Students worked independently on these projects and were able to pick their own topics. Of course I picked knitting! The site has been updated somewhat since the final version for the assignment, and is now hosted on my own website. I will be continuing to add resources to knit one, find one, and I hope that it becomes a useful resource for knitters both experienced and new.
Women in the Civil War
For a Spring 2009 class, LS 507 Information Sources & Services, students were placed in groups at the beginning of the semester and completed a series of assignments culminating in a small (and virtual) reference collection on a topic of the group’s choice. The BiblioBabes group determined a mutual interest in the role of women during the American Civil War. As team leader for this final project, I designed and developed the Women in the Civil War web site as a presentation vehicle for our carefully chosen sources. The professor we developed this site for will be using it as an examplar for future students.
LS590 – Web Multimedia
For the summer semester of 2010, I took this elective class which provided students with exposure to five major multimedia elements for incorporation into website design:
- Podcasting/vodcasting
- Web graphics
- Web calendars
- Widgets
- YouTube videos
Multimedia elements provide creative, interactive, and novel ways for libraries to deliver information to their patrons and this course provided hands-on experience in incorporating media into a presentation website as well while addressing issues of universal design and accessibility: LS590 – Web Multimedia.
Library Student Journal Emerging Leaders Issue
In my capacity as (volunteer) Layout Editor for Library Student Journal, I worked directly with the editor, Miriam Sweeney, to design the layout for the “2009 Emerging Leaders Issue”. Previous versions of this special issue were formatted using deprecated tags and formats. I upgraded the format from HTML to XHTML and replaced elements such as tables with XHTML-compliant CSS styling in an external stylesheet.