Expertise and Services
It is important that every business and individual have a website where they can accurately brand and promote themselves. I can build basic 2-3 page sites to sites with an unlimited amount of pages with a content management system. A website should promote and differentiate your brand, a free template just won’t do it. A combination of a great design and content will drive customers to you. I can facilitate the creation of your entire site, including design, content creation, photos/images , marketing / social media, hosting, and domain names. I have won two national awards for website design and am currently a part-time web designer for the University of Georgia. I have experience working with Dreamweaver, WordPress, HTML 5, CSS3, Javascript, PHP MySQL, Accessibility Standards, Flash and Photoshop to name a few. Visit my company Thrasher Designs to view my web design portfolio or Contact me if interested.
Much of my training in my Management Information Systems B.B.A. and Master of Internet Technology program has been around the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and Agile Development. I have real world team experience working hands on with organizations for requirements gathering and generating UML and BPMN diagrams to model as-is and to-be processes and systems and in many cases developing an entire system. In 2011 I worked with a four person team to create a large set of BPMN diagrams that modeled the as-is process of the Sponsored Programs Division at the UGA Office of the Vice President for Research. It did a great job of helping them figure out exactly what it is they do and the different paths a grant can take and aided them in configuring a new grant management system they were implementing.
I am also experienced in different systems development methodologies like SCRUM, agile software development and rapid prototyping using tools like Zoho Creator.
Flash is one of the most rapidly growing platforms online. I have experience creating flash animations as well as coding with actionscript. I have an online game I created in high school called Summation that challenges your math skills and maintained a high score list (high score list deactivated). I have also worked on more advanced projects involving Flash 3D animation and remote XML calls to create dynamic animations on the fly. It can be viewed at StarWarsIntro.com. I can also create flash videos and slideshows.
The general framework of Relational Databases has not changed much in the past few years but the way and complexity to which they are used continues to impress me. I have experience working on the ground floor with database design, I first learned to develop database systems and write queries in a command prompt. Thankfully tools like MySQL workbench make generating database models and running queries much easier. I have many opportunities to help clients create or improve an existing data model and/or database.
What do you do when you want information on a product or service? You Google it of course. Careful placement of keywords and links throughout your page can make a huge difference. I take advantage of tools provided by Google and Yahoo to determine what keywords will give the maximum return. The way your site is coded can also increase (or decrease) your rankings. I cannot promise a specific placement, only that I would follow the best practices for SEO and provide you with insights and help improving your site structure, optimizing content, dealing with crawlers, smart phone optimization and promotion and analytics. I run advanced experiments using google webmaster tools to measure conversion rates based on changes in content and then analyze the keywords and locations that brought them there with analytics tools.
An online marketing strategy can exponentially increase your brand value and profits. Relatively inexpensive ads can be pin-pointed to your target demographic on search engines like google and social media sites like facebook. Your business may lend itself to having its on Page on Facebook or Twitter. I manage several facebook pages for businesses that have seen a measurable increase in web traffic (up to 400%) from utilizing social media. You create more than visibility with social media, you create valuable interations. See The Sandbar Broad River Kayaking’s Facebook Page for an example. I also do traditional banner ad creation.
