J.T.Polk Web Development & Design
webdev.jimtompolk.com

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Web Design
Web Development
Information Architecture
Usability
I can sit down with you, and by listening to your needs, design you a site to customized to your and your companies needs, create it, handling all aspects of it's creation, set it up with a hosting company and maintain the your site going forward into the future.

About

I specialize in taking a company brand and extending it onto the World Wide Web. For design, I can either take existing literature and logo and convert them to a web format, or come up with everything from scratch. Whether your company information has to be scanned in, is a "bad" website that needs fixing, or is in PhotoShop, Acrobat, Illustrator format, or even an InDesign catalog, I have had years of experience in taking all sorts of media and converting it to formats suitable for the web.

This includes taking copy (the text) that is suitable for print and converting it to "web copy". The is necessary because the way people read information on the web is different than in print.

I have often quiped that if you give me a logo, some brochures and a couple of visits to the company, I can come up with a great looking website that will reflect your companies values, aims and needs.

In the past, I have specialized in working two types of companies: those smaller companies just getting started on the Internet and companies that have had a problems with their first attempt.

Background

From 1982 to 1996 I supported myself working in retails sales and mangement. In 1992 I found the Internet, and with a home PC and a modem, started exploring and determined that the Internet was going to be big. In 1994, I discovered the World Wide Web and decided that was going to be big and important and world changing, and I wanted to be a part of that that change.

I created my first website in 1995. It was a 50 Kilobyte site on cris.com. Later they allowed 100 Kilobytes (yes, that IS KiloBytes).

In August of 1996 I created my first commercial web site in exchange for a hard drive.

In December of 1996 I sold my first commercial web site.

In May of 1997 I started working for Camalott Communications in Abilene, Texas. I continued working for them, growning into my position as lead (often only) web designer and developer, webmaster, salesman, advisor and system administrator until they were sold to Texas Communications in May of 2005. I was relieved of my site design, webmaster, advisory, sales and system administrator duties and was assigned the position of web developer. In January of 2006, Texas Communications laid me off because of a lack of work.

I graduated from Sweetwater High School, Sweetwater, Texas. I am a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Arts (History) and Bachelor of Arts in Drama in 1982.

I attended some computer classes at Midland Community College (1994-1995) and Texas State Technical College at Sweetwater (1995-1996). I left to learn and develop my skills with the new technology of the Internet, which were not being taught at that time. However, they did teach me the basic skills in Unix Networking, databases and SQL, and the fundemental of good programming practices.

I taught classes in the Adult Education Dept at TSTC Sweetwater from 1996 to 1998 - Office (Word, Excel), Intro to the Internet, Intro to PC's, etc.

I was born in 1954, and am happily married to my grade school crush, living in Austin, Texas.

Technologies Used (partial inventory)

Graphic Design of Web Sites using PhotoShop, Ilustrator, DreamWeaver, GoLive, and Acrobat.

HTML/XHTML Web Sites

PHP/JavaScript/MySQL Dynamic Web Sites

PHP/JavaScript/XML Dynamic Web Sites

PHP/JavaScript/Ajax/MySQL/XML Web Sites

Web Copy creation.

QuickTime movie creation.

eCommerce Catalogs (PHP/MySQL based preferred)

IntraNet Portals - straightforward, customized
(can also adapt Open Source portals)

I work on LAMP platforms - Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. I've recently learned how to create a CMS (Content Management System) using XML/XSLT/etc.

I can also help with Domain Registration, transfers, and other basic setup requirements for creating a new site, or moving a site from one hosting provider to another.

Tools Used (partical inventory)

DreamWeaver (with Interakt MX Kollection), Flash

GoLive, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat

Apache - administration, setup.

PHP, SSI - some Perl

Eclipse

MySQL

CentOS, RedHat, Linux

Swishmax

And many other editors, applications and tools to make site creation swift and efficient.

Jim Tom Polk
J.T. Polk Web Development and Design © 2006 All Rights Reserved.
Austin, Texas
Email: jtpolk@jimtompolk.com