So who am I?

My name is Steven Weathers.  I was born and raised in Orange County California, where I graduated from El Modena High School in 2006.  Before graduating, I managed to take multiple courses at Central County Regional Occupational Program (CCROP), an adult education center.  I have recently been relocated to Concord North Carolina where I now attend Rowan-Cabarrus Community College studying Web Technologies.  In my free time, I am a freelance frontend web developer working with Piranha Method.  I love to create clean and user-friendly websites, focusing on markup and scripting.  I am always looking to expand my knowledge in the field, especialy in backend development using PHP and MySQL.

When it comes to technology, I consider myself a geek.  During high school, I took courses in computer hardware, software, networking, graphics design, web development, Microsoft Office, and video editing.  I have built, repaired, and upgraded computers since 2002.  Applications I have worked with include:  the Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Flash, Adobe Acrobat Pro, Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, and VMWare Workstation.  I have experience with Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 platforms; as well as Mac OS X and Linux platforms.

What can I do?

With over five years’ experience in Front End Web Development, I have the ability to offer web services focusing on W3C standards & search engine optimized markup, compliant XHTML Strict 1.0 & CSS 2.1 coding, as well as the use of JavaScript libraries such as jQuery.  I prefer to hand code XHTML and CSS in Notepad++, but with PHP and MySQL I use reference material for what I can due to not being very well versed yet.  When it comes to browser compatibility I focus on Internet Explorer 7+, Mozilla Firefox 3+, Apple Safari 4+, Google Chrome, and Opera on 1024×768 and higher resolutions.  I believe in “less is more” and try to use as little images as possible in my designs along with PNG optimizing to lower file sizes without sacrificing quality.

Version four of My Digital Portfolio

During my spring 2010 semester of college, I was tasked with designing a new e-portfolio to show to a board of advisers.  This was the result.  When I started the design process, my goals were to be user-friendly and clean while maintaining professionalism and a modern look.  Some requirements were given including a blog, rss feed, web 2.0 technology, and a professional résumé.  I chose jQuery to power many of the features I had planned and hand coded the XHTML & CSS as per my usual method.  For my blog, I chose WordPress as the engine and themed it with the same layout as my portfolio to keep things uniform.  My web 2.0 technology, as per required, was my email contact form which uses jQuery, PHP, and json or better known as AJAX.

Version 4.5 of My Digital Portfolio

In late 2010, after having been working with Kentico CMS during work hours, I decided it was time to redevelop my website onto a Content Management System. For this task I chose to keep WordPress that I was using for the blog side of my website and just expand it further out to encompass the whole site. I waited for WordPress 3.0 final to officially release, for its added features such as custom post types and child themes.