Portfolio

City of Bryan’s 150th Anniversary

This is one of the coolest and most rewarding projects I’ve ever been involved with. In November 2021, the City of Bryan celebrated its 150th anniversary of incorporation. Our Communications team put together a dynamic and multifaceted campaign that used the 150 website as the core of the entire venture. Complications from the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic made in-person events dicey, so we gave people the types of museum-quality events, information, and entertainment through the website and our other digital efforts. I have lovingly called this 150 website my “Magnum Opus” as I not only designed and constructed the whole site, but I also wrote all of the content, including a 25,000 word interactive history of Bryan, I directed and/or produced almost all of the video and audio interviews, photo galleries, and interactive elements, and I created the social media content, providing daily historical tidbits over a 3 month period in the fall of 2021.

City of Bryan

The largest site that I manage in my role as the City of Bryan’s Web Communications Specialist, the main City of Bryan website is the front door to all the city has to offer, and it has the most moving parts and idiosyncrasies of any site that I’ve every worked on. The current city website is the third iteration since I took on my role in 2013 and we are currently in the process of redesigning the fourth iteration in the site’s evolution.

Bryan Texas Utilities

The second of the three primary sites that I manage for the City of Bryan, the BTU website is clean and simple, and has one primary goal: Get people to the place where they can pay their bills and manage their accounts online. Other features, such as our real-time outage map and new service setup processes, see spikes in traffic at certain times, but overall, online bill payments and account management is the No. 1 reason that people come to the BTU website.

Bryan + College Station Public Library System

The third of the three primary sites that I mange for the City of Bryan, this is the third iteration of the BCS Public Library System’s website and it is my favorite by far. We really took things to another level with this redesign by rethinking not just the site, but the entire digital workflow of the library system. Using the site as the catalyst, we created a digital content calendar and I took on the responsibilities of generating these blog posts and content updates rather than asking the librarians to do so. This allowed us to maintain consistency in the style and voice of our writing, but also the look and feel of the redesign, something that was difficult to maintain in previous iterations. The website was the opening salvo in what has become a quite successful digital transformation for the libraries.

Unpretentious Palate

Your source for the best of the inside info about the Charlotte, N.C. food, bar, and restaurant scene. Unpretentious Palate is the brainchild of former Charlotte Magazine Editor and former Washington Post journalist Kristen Wile, and it has become a very successful subscription-based venture since its launch in 2018. UP’s website was my first deep-dive into paywalled content requirements and some other emerging best practices, like JSON-LD metadata for Google. The UP site in many ways helped advance the playbook for many of my future websites as it required more custom PHP development and integrations than any site I had worked on up to that point. It’s always fun to help old friends succeed and I’m very happy to be a member of “Team UP.”

Confluence 23: Music Conference and Festival

A project that I am currently involved with, this is a website for the 2023 Confluence Music Conference and Festival in Charlotte, N.C. in October. Phase one is currently finished with multiple other phases in the works – speaker bios, conference schedule, etc. This has been a fun project as I’m working with multiple stakeholders including the non-profit behind the conference, the internal creative team, the outside marketing and events firm, and others. This is definitely a site that doesn’t just get designed and handed off to someone. I will be actively participating with this project through the conference in October.

The Cost of DWI: A City of Bryan Special Report

One of the most impactful initiatives I’ve ever worked on, “The Cost of DWI” was a special project and microsite conceived by myself, Ryan Stout and Officer Kelley McKethan of the Bryan Police Department. We wanted to do something that was more than just a standard public service announcement in the spring of 2014, and so we took on the challenge of interviewing victims who had been impacted by drinking and driving. It was such an amazing and impactful experience, that we decided to do it again in 2015. This time, we focused on the flipside – offenders. This site is custom coded HTML, CSS, and JS using the Foundation framework. This project garnered attention throughout the state of Texas and received multiple awards, including a special recognition award from Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Bradley Baseball Academia

The official website of Coach Andy Bradley’s instructional academy and youth baseball teams: the Bradley Eagles. Coach Bradley and his organization were my first freelance clients in 2011 and are still with me to this day. Over the last 12 years, the Bradley team and I have gone through four iterations of the BBA website, an organizational name change, a complete rebranding, and a lot of youth baseball players going on to play ball in college.

City of Bryan: State of the City 2019

We had fun with this one. Since 2014, I have been involved with creating an annual “State of the City” report for the City of Bryan. We generally pick a theme and then try to make these reports as engaging, informative and as fun as possible. The reports consist of two elements: a video report that highlights 4-5 topics, and then a microsite that highlights the accomplishments of every department within the city. Well, in 2019 we decided to do a Discovery Channel “Planet Earth” or “Life” style report. I was the primary writer on the video script and used the type of language that one of these nature documentaries would use. We then paid for a David Attenborough-style voiceover specialist to do the narration. The website itself took its inspiration from the National Geographic website. This site is custom coded HTML, CSS, and JS using the Foundation framework. Perhaps one of my favorite professional moments was being able to translate the words for “garbage truck drivers” into Latin: “Agitator Vastum Solidae.”

Personal Work

Chicago Cubs ringbearer nomination videos (2017)

Goodbye Video for Ryan Stout

Work for the City of Bryan