I built my first website in 2003, for my high school garage band, using Microsoft Frontpage. We admitted to anyone who saw us in concerts or festivals that we knew they weren't there to see us — the tagline on our shirts was, "We're the other band." (I just checked the Wayback Machine. There are some snapshots of it still out there. Yeah…the site was as bad as the band was. But it did have a link to a custom branded EZBoard forum and a group chat feature.)

However, it wouldn't be until 15 years and a whole other career later that I would start doing websites professionally. In 2018, I left my old career behind and went freelance as a web project manager and developer. I'm now in my second full-time position in web, and I just love it. Since the beginning, I have managed or developed for nearly a hundred website build or maintenance projects.

I really love the start to finish of a website project, especially as a developer. It's very gratifying to get to focus on a project and stick with it until it's done. I'm totally fine with juggling, but my favorite thing is getting stuck in with one thing for a few weeks and then delivering and moving to the next.

When it comes to managing projects, what I love most is the working on the strategy and architecture of the site. Most of my project management experience also included me doing UX design (sitemaps and wireframes). I love when the client starts to get a picture of how the site is all going to work together. They start to see success through the glimmer of light coming down the long project tunnel.

Whether I'm developing or managing, I get a bit obsessive about getting clarity and having things clearly communicated and documented. In my current role, we use Asana for basically everything. I believe that keeping Asana fully filled out and up to date is so important for transparency with the client, accountability with team members, and just making sure the project is actually gonna get done with everything done right and on time. I'm the one that might be asking so many clarifying questions as to get on some people's nerves sometimes.

Early on, almost all the sites I worked on were made with pre-built templates (think Themeforest, etc.). That was just the default for the agencies I was working with at the time. We only did custom themes for the "big" projects. As I grew in my skills as a developer, I began to build with custom themes almost exclusively. My work with my current company is exclusively on WordPress, and I have a starter theme and plugin set that I use whenever I'm building from scratch.

I like to say that anything can be done on WordPress. And the projects that I've worked on demonstrate that. Velociteach and Transamerican Auto Parts are two of the more complex projects projects I've worked on. In addition to those and the other projects in the project display rack above, another complex project I've worked on was for a client named GEM Fellowship. GEM Fellowship wanted to implement a conference management system on their WordPress site, so we started by using The Events Calendar and Event Tickets Plus (both are WordPress plugins created by the same author), and extended the functionality of those plugins to be able to: 1) have nested parent/child relationships between events; 2) create a custom multi-step registration process that allows a user to build their conference itinerary, registering for multiple events from one screen; 3) customize the event registration form page to group separate registrations together in one checkout process; and 4) customize the final checkout screen to show the registration form questions and make them editable after checkout.

For GEM Fellowship, and for most of the projects I've worked on, there can be hundreds of tasks and subtasks, especially as a complex project gets into QA and testing. I love project management systems like Asana and Jira. I have the most experience with Asana. I keep it open in my browser at all times. It is how I stay organized, whether I'm managing or developing. As I mentioned above, I believe it's crucial for the health of a project that the entire scope of the project is faithfully tracked and managed somewhere. It doesn't have to be Asana; it just has to be somewhere. Somewhere that can be the source of truth for everything that needs to get done, especially when handling multiple projects and timelines.

I'm very happy in my current role at Classic City Consulting, but I am always looking for the next opportunity to grow in my career, to work with cool people, and to do good in the world. I love what I have seen about Agital, and the prospect of working with you all is very exciting. I'm looking for compensation somewhere around $125-150k, for a role such as what you're looking for.

Although it's a bit of a challenge to talk about myself so much, I want to give you a picture of who I am and where I'm coming from, and I really appreciate you reading all of this. It was a labor of love. I'd really like to hear from you next!