Imagine Design Experience principal designer Mike Madison gave a guest lecture at Oregon State University on Wednesday, 1/6/10.

Madison spoke to a Human Computer Interaction class from the School of Computer Science which was instructed by Margaret Burnett. Topics of the lecture included Madison’s work as a web designer, the principles of design and how they can be applied outside of HCI, and approaching the job search.

One thing that’s a little tough about working in the web design business: You don’t always know when the next job will be, where it will come from, or what it will pay. That makes things a little difficult in terms of charitable donations.

But.

I’m very proud to say that I support two not-for profit agencies every year.
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If you’ve followed my work for the last few years, you might be wondering why suddenly there is a little blue waterdrop all over my website these days. “Mike,” you might ask. “I thought you were a WordPress guy? Don’t you love WordPress anymore!?” Of course I still love WordPress. BUT! There a few things that Drupal does that are, well, better. And, as the geeky, new technology liking, (did I mention geeky?) web designer that I am, I’m always looking for new cool things.
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When I’m finishing up a web design project, one of the final steps is cross-browser standardization. For the lay person, making sure that the website looks the same in… Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox 2, Mozilla Firefox 3, Safari, and Google Chrome (not to mention PC and Mac versions of Firefox). Oh, and these are just the most used browsers out there, not ALL of them.
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An evening with the women students and faculty of EECS . Topics include research and internship opportunities. This evening’s speaker is Dr. Teri Fiez, Head of EECS and a Solar Energy Entrepreneur.

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A lot of my clients have a problem. They have a website, or they decide they want one, and they just don’t know what the heck they want to do with the thing.

“We have a site that is really out of date, but we don’t know if its worth the money to update it. No one USES it for anything!” I get this from more people than you might think.

“We want a website, but we don’t know what to put on it.” I get this one a lot too.

This entry is entirely dedicated to helping you find some things to do on your site that aren’t a jolly waste of space, time, and money.
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http://speckyboy.com/2009/09/22/20-powerful-wordpress-security-plugins-and-some-tips-and-tricks/

Worth browsing if you’re concerned about this sort of thing!

I pride myself as a web designer on my ability to make WordPress do what I want it to do, where I want it to do. One of the real strengths of WordPress is your freedom to use the “blog” / posts functionality for a TON of stuff that isn’t a blog. For example, this website has a Blog, a Portfolio, and a Home page that are all content managed by the same engine within WordPress. The blog itself has categories. The portfolio has categories. The hompage has “categories,” but really everything there is just setup to make the slider, quotes, and other pieces function.
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I decided several months ago that my portfolio was getting big enough that I should do something to make it significantly more user friendly than it was to navigate. Of course, I’d seen a fair number of filterable / sortable portfolios out there on the web, and I eventually decided this was the way I wanted to go though.

Great! Now what?

I started doing some digging and I found a lot of great examples, but I had a really difficult time finding a specific plugin, example, or guide for a WordPress sortable Portfolio. So, I eventually gave up on finding something that was completely pre-fab and I built one myself. You can see the finished product online in my web design portfolio, here.
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Something with WordPress you aren’t sure about? Other general web design tips / tricks? Let me know and I might just write a walkthrough for you!