Dale Sande .:. Web Designer

Photos.com

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Employer:Getty Images
Project:Photos.com
Link: www.photos.com
Platform: Ruby on Rails

Photos.com was an awesome project to be a part of and continues to be an amazing experience in how to engineer web projects in the enterprise. Everything I learned in small business development is challenged and improved upon.

Photos.com is now part of a leading family of royalty free image purchase/subscription outlets under the umbrella of Getty Images. Hired to work with a Ruby on Rails team, I hold the role of UI Engineer for the redevelopment and maintenance of Photos.com. In this position I work closely with a UI Design team to develop the presentation layer markup and execute UX for the site.

Many achievements were gained during this project, one of which was a process overhaul for design and development patterns in an agile environment. Leveraging UI Design pattern principals, I was able to build a highly reusable UI code base which allowed for rapid prototype development and full UI vetting prior to services integration. This process was key in delivering quality code in the shortest time possible by achieving buy off from the design team while providing value to the development team that the UI is stable.

Aldeen Golf Club

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Client:Aldeen Golf Club
Link: www.aldeengolfclub.com
Platform: Acumium CMS

The Aldeen Golf Club was the second project I completed with the Rockford Park District. Without a doubt, the project was inspired by the amazing photography of the landscape. As one of the leading public golf courses in the country, the goal was to deliver the richness of a private club to a public park.

Again, we worked with the Rockford Park District creative team and a local photographer to create a web site that has been well received by the Park Trusties, the county and the people of Rockford.

Some of the special features that we brought to this project was integration with third party resources for event registration and newsletter support. We also further customized the events calendar so that the Gold Club and the Park District main site would share data. Edit on one place and display in both sites. Major time saver!

Rockford Park District

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Client: Rockford Park District
Link: www.rockfordparkdistrict.org
Platform: Acumium CMS

This was a great opportunity to work with the second largest park district in Illinois. The primary goal was to work with the park district's creative and marketing teams to develop a single solution to unite the many sub-organizations that live under the park district's umbrella, increase readership and encourage greater online resources. Third party data integration, online registration processes and custom content solutions were all needed to deliver this project.

Some of the special features that we brought to this site was integration with a series of third party application for event and program registration, special admin permissions for satellite employees to make emergency updates regarding programs and events. Last we customized the Events Calendar to give user advanced filter options.

University of Wisconsin Foundation

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Client:University of Wisconsin Foundation
Link: www.uwfoundation.wisc.edu
Platform: Acumium CMS

Working with the University of Wisconsin Foundation was a an opportunity to work with a great marketing team. Without a doubt, the foundation had a wonderful assortment of creative and marketing materials, so designing that site was a rewarding experience. The project not only needed a great design, but a goal to improve the users experience and bring more emotion to the gift givers story.

This project consisted of a couple special features, one being an integrated directory. Using a SOAP service, the site front end is tied directly into an organization managed staff directory. This allowed the Foundation to manage their main directory and not have to manage the site's directory as well.

The second was to integrate the Gift Giving process seamlessly into the site. Working with the Foundation's IT staff, we assisted in providing clean UI templates for the form screens.

University of Wisconsin Alumni Association

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Client: University of Wisconsin Alumni Association
Link: www.uwalumni.com
Platform: Acumium CMS

Working with the University of Wisconsin Alumni Association was a phased - multi year project to improve its online presence, increase alumni interaction and provide next generation tools and support for it's Chapter and other organizations.

The first phase of the project consisted of legacy site evaluation, content cataloging, interviewing members of the association and working with the web team to develop a road map for the next generation site. Materials produced from these efforts included new User Experience (UX) design wireframes, informational architecture recommendations and new content strategies. Primary features of the project, such as the Alumni Directory, were closely evaluated for new UX workflows, data collection informational architecture, and the development of next generation tools for Chapter content management solutions.

Rawhide Boys Ranch

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Client:Rawhide Boys Ranch
Link: www.rawhide.org
Platform: Acumium CMS

The Rawhide Boys Ranch project was a great opportunity to work with an organization that has helped so many boys in need. Co-founded by Bart Starr, Green Bay Packer great and recent winner of the Lifetime Philanthropy Award, this is an esteemed organization to work with.

The goal of the design was to showcase the rustic feeling of the ranch as well as present images and stories that bring inspiration and emotion to the ranch. This was addressed with a series of tools installed to create a slide show and randomly present success stories of boys who have been helped.

Dinner Helpers

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Client:Dinner Helpers
Link: http://www.dinnerhelpers.com
Platform: Acumium CMS

This project was especially unique due to the large number of custom business management tools that were developed.  Not only was this web site built on a content management solution, but my team also engineered an amazing array of web applications to manage ingredients, meals, menus, schedules and a custom ecommerce solution to fit their business needs.

This project was extra challenging, since the key users were not experienced computer users, we needed to find ways to deliver complex functionality in easy to understand solutions.  Dinner Helpers has continued to manage and expand their buisness using this application for the past 5 years.