Nelson Ford is a Web Developer based in Vancouver

Vancouver.com

• Employer: Intrawest Corp.
• Location: Vancouver, British Columbia
• Year: 2004-2006

Please note: Vancouver.com is currently under re-development by its current ownership.

Recruited by one of North America's premier resort real estate development corporations to contribute design and content development expertise to the creation and maintenance of dynamic websites for international resorts and corporate affiliated services.

Responsibilities at Intrawest:

• Instrumental in the successful re-launch of the Vancouver.com website in 2006, with hands-on involvement in identifying new content opportunities, creating stylesheets and web pages, and developing strategies to increase site traffic.
• Created CSS for other high-profile sites such as coppercolorado.com, tremblant.ca and montelagovillage.com, in addition to maintaining content for 16 other major sites using Microsoft Content Management Server.
• Designed banner advertisements that demonstrably resulted in increased traffic, and collaborated with the online marketing coordinator to generate marketing slogans and track the success rate of keywords in Google advertising campaigns.
• Entrusted to develop HTML and plain-text versions of monthly email newsletters.
• Liaised with the Business Support Group and the Copywriting team to assist in the update of website content, ensuring that all site content was accurate, up-to-date, and requested new content.
• Embraced the opportunity to contribute to special Javascript and XML/XSLT projects.
• Relied upon for project management and technical expertise by the website development team, provided extensive training and support on XHTML, CSS, and XSLT.

In 2006, Intrawest undertook a massive overhaul of Vancouver.com to transform it from a site focused on tourism bookings (hotels, rental cars etc), to one that could be a resource for information on all aspects of the city.

As the sole Web Producer for this site, I was charged with not only working in various task groups on organizing the new site and coming up with new content ideas, consulting on information architecture changes, and working with external content partners (such as Zip.ca, ClubZone, and Toronto.com), but virtually all new content that was being produced for the site went through me for posting, and I implemented the new design from Blast Radius using CSS. Special projects for the site included the addition of a webcam, and building a Google map of the city's traffic cams, which quickly became a site favourite. The result was a significant increase in site traffic, and its Google ranking eventually increased to first position for the keyword "Vancouver."

AngusReidForum.com

• Employer: Vision Critical, An Angus Reid Company
• Location: Vancouver, British Columbia
• Year: 2007

Embraced the opportunity to join this start-up company providing custom online market research panels to use web development skills to efficiently program market research surveys including creating CSS and skinning the surveys with diverse clients branding images.

Responsibilities at Vision Critical:

• Proactively streamlined and standardized HTML and CSS codes, enabling improved efficiency and reduced times in future programming and skinning.
• Evaluated and improved the company's panel plus software, improving the HTML coding and helping bring the programs to modernized web standards.

This position involved a great deal of CSS skinning of clients' Panel Plus-based research portals. My role evolved into making recommendations for how to improve the HTML templates so as to ease the process of skinning. I created the HTML template for the Angus Reid Forum homepage template, which clicks through to the Panel+ software templates, and CSS skinned both using Photoshop files provided by an in-house designer.

Cisco.com

• Employer: Cisco Systems (contract)
• Location: San Jose, California
• Year: 2007

Retained as a member of a 10-person team focused on developing and maintaining the infrastructure on the Cisco multi-million page corporate website consisting of multiple international page versions in diverse languages and 7-8 publishing systems.

Responsibilities at Cisco:

• Employed advance web design tools and proficiency in proprietary tools to build customized templates for internal content publishers to post new information.
• Drew on advanced expertise to help build new infrastructure in XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, facilitating the ongoing development of this billion-dollar e-commerce website.
• Took a lead role in researching accessibility issues relating to Adobe Flash content on Cisco.com, produced documentation and made recommendations on how to make improvements in this area.

Working on-site at the Cisco campus in San Jose, California, I was part of a team of Interface Developers charged with the task of producing accessible, forward-compatible templates for this enormous site comprising millions of pages, and updated by business units around the world. Source control, documentation and attention to detail were critical in this role, and this experience was invaluable to me.

The photo is of a "Display Other [Product] Views" popup window template for which I rewrote the HTML, CSS, and Javascript to bring it in line with Cisco.com's new design, based on guidelines from Cisco's online user experience department.

FutureShop.ca

• Year: 2007

FutureShop was building an interactive video assistant named Aaron, to help website users find information more efficiently, and in a friendly, more organic way. Working through Fuse Interactive, I contributed to the PHP code driving Aaron's content management system (CMS).

Features of this project:

• Aaron is driven by a PHP/MySQL CMS
• Future Shop uploads videos and associates them to different keywords
• The CMS has video uploading and processing capabilities
• Keywords are then associated to these videos, some of which are humorous and entertaining

My role in this project:

I contributed approximately 50% of the PHP code that went into the content management system that Future Shop uses to upload video clips and associate them to keywords on the "Ask an Expert" module.

CarlaRieger.com

• Year: 2004

Carla Rieger is a motivational speaker based in Vancouver and Point Roberts, Washington. She was looking for a site that would convey her personality, and highlight her past clients. The client wanted a dynamic site that could be easily updated, without the extra weight of a backend database and content management system.

Features of this site:

• Built using custom PHP templates for ease of maintenance. Main content templates are easy to identify and modify.
• Employs simple text files that can be easily updated with quotes from clients. These are randomly chosen using PHP and displayed in the blue "Delighted Clients" section in the left-hand column.
• Videos of the client's keynote presentations are available in various formats, and viewable in the chosen format based on user preference.
• A PHP-based newsletter signup form emails the subscription request to the client.
• A PHP-based contact form is present.
• At the time it was built, the site featured valid CSS and XHTML.

My role in this project:

I performed all functions, from identifying requirements, drafting the agreement, all XHTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP coding, managing a designer, billing, set-up of hosting and deployment.