Selected Projects
KavodHouse.com
Kavod House is a social justice-promoting cooperative household and community center for young Jews in Boston. Their existing website looked dated and was difficult to maintain. Working with the house residents, I came up with a visual design that is far more true to the community, and implemented this design as a Wordpress theme. This project launched in early October.
GLAD.org
A rare example of my public-facing work for this organization, these quarterly e-newsletters are sent to GLAD's entire mailing list. I designed a "seasonal" theme, ensured that these emails display properly in all major email clients, and then integrated the template with Constant Contact's tracking tools.
RighteousIndignation.info
An impending book release and a missing-in-action web developer brought this project to me. Working with the book's editors in Boston and San Francisco, I created a design true to the book's branding, then built several holding pages, installed a CMS, and launched the first iteration of the full website, all in the space of a month. The back-end of the website has since been switched from Textpattern to Drupal, but both my design and the CSS I wrote remain in use.
MassEquality.org
Following a major political victory, I worked with the communications director at MassEquality to redesign the entire website to better fit the organization's ongoing mission, refactoring much of the existing codebase in the process.
KassiaKarr.com
Kassia Karr, a Boston-based photographer, approached me about building an online portfolio for her work. After choosing to go with a minimalist aesthetic, we built the entire website in a one-day marathon session.
Am I Available?
Yep! I'm currently available for small contracts and part-time work. Have an interesting project? Get in touch!
Reach Me
EMAIL:
PHONE: (617) 500-7825
SKYPE: ruthiebendor
TWITTER: @unruthless
Skills and Experience
I write hand-coded, semantically correct XHTML and pair it with elegant, sensible CSS.
I have a deep understanding of cross-browser compatibility issues, usability and user experience concerns, and accessibility challenges.
I have solid working knowledge of relational databases, and experience writing form-handling scripts using PHP and MySQL, with an eye toward defensive design.
I've worked in and around different content management systems, including Wordpress, Textpattern, and ExpressionEngine, as well as several custom CMSs.
I have solid working knowledge of Javascript, and have used jQuery on several projects. Like right here on this page, for example.
I know enough Flash and Actionscript to stay out of trouble, and have implemented sIFR on a project or two.
I have substantial experience with website statistics tracking, mostly using Google Analytics.
I know my way around Photoshop and Illustrator, but find I do my best work in Fireworks.