Selected Past Projects

This Vancouver web developer portfolio includes a few selected projects I've worked on over the last few years.

DavidSuzuki.org

  • Client: David Suzuki Foundation
  • Location: Vancouver, British Columbia
  • Year: July 2010
DavidSuzuki.org - Web development Nelson Ford former project

Provided consulting to the David Suzuki Foundation for the online presence of their "At Work" program. They were looking for ways to increase the visibility of the program's offerings on both the homepage, and within the "What You Can Do" section of the site. I delivered a report outlining numerous recommendations including some streamlining of the navigation system, moving the At Work content on the homepage to areas where they would more likely be noticed based on common user behaviour and page-scanning patterns, and suggested layout enhancement of the At Work content pages to maximize space. My goal was to organize the content in a way that would help users understand the different offerings of the At Work program quickly and visually, without requiring a great deal of reading, and a minimal number of clicks. DavidSuzuki.org uses a customized version of Movable Type for content management, so my recommendations had to work as much as possible within the existing page template framework.

MetroVancouverLiving.com

  • Location: Vancouver, British Columbia
  • Year: 2008-Present
MetroVancouverLiving.com - Web development Nelson Ford former project

Built this site to provide company with an online presence for accommodation booking. Customers can search for availbility at various properties using custom-built booking engine. Components include booking engine, administration management interface for property, rates and schedule integrated with iCal, data feeds for weather and Vancouver events. Created design, responsible for all content, SEO, search marketing with Adwords, traffic analysis with Google Analytics, social media promotion (Facebook / Twitter / Foursquare). Since addition of this site's advanced features, company has increased online booking by approximately 90% and reduced vacancy rates by approximately 50%. Site built with PHP, MySQL database, and jQuery-enhanced interface on front-end and administration panel.

Vancouver.com

  • Employer: Intrawest Corp.
  • Location: Vancouver, British Columbia
  • Year: 2004-2006
Vancouver.com - Web development Nelson Ford former project

Intrawest, one of North America's premier resort real estate development corporations owned Vancouver.com for a number of years. As the sole Web Producer for this site, I was instrumental in its successful re-launch in 2006, with hands-on involvement in identifying new content opportunities, applying new CSS designs with stylesheets, and assisting the Director of Ecommerce with strategies to increase site traffic. I built HTML and plain-text versions of Vancouver.com's monthly email newsletter, worked with the Business Support Group and the Copywriting team to ensure that all site content was accurate and up-to-date. 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 it contributed to the sites eventual rise to first position in Google for the keyword "Vancouver." The site is now under new ownership.

AngusReidForum.com

  • Employer: Vision Critical
  • Location: Vancouver, British Columbia
  • Year: 2007
angusreidforum.com - Angus Reid Forum site, Nelson Ford web development project, XHTML/CSS

Vision Critical provides custom online market research panel software. My my role at VC included using web development skills to program market research surveys including skinning the surveys to match the brands of a diverse range of clients. I worked proactively to streamline and standardize HTML and CSS codes, with the goal of enabling improved efficiency and reduced times in future programming and skinning. I created the HTML template for the Angus Reid Forum homepage template, which clicks through to the Panel+ software templates, and skinned both using Photoshop files provided by an in-house designer.

Cisco.com

  • Employer: Cisco Systems (contract)
  • Location: San Jose, California
  • Year: 2007
cisco.com - Web Interface Developer project of Nelson Ford

Working on-site at Cisco's San Jose campus, I was part of a team of Interface Developers charged with 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 "Ask an Expert" Video Guide

  • Year: 2007
FutureShop.ca

Future Shop 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) that Future Shop uses to upload video clips and associate them to keywords on their site's video greeter module. This was a very interesting project that gave me a stronger understanding of building custom content management systems, and interfacing a PHP and MySQL back-end with a Flash front-end.