DATES:
August 1999-May 2000

SPECIFICS:
HTML design and production, graphic design and editing, administration, hiring, user experience and interface design, scheduling, features writing and editing, promotional writing and editing, digital photography and art direction.

OVERVIEW:
When I started at eHobbies, an eCompanies-funded startup, the site was due to launch in 40 days and had no pages, no graphics, no style guide, and little idea how to make it happen.

When the site launched, on time, I'd built an entire content section myself, one page at a time, for six hobby categories. I edited and formatted copy, developing a unified style guide for the site (code and graphics), and worked closely with the technology department to create a solid set of API documentation. I handled creative direction of all subsidiary design elements (navigation, promotional spots, et cetera). The site was supposed to be "database driven," with each piece of content being sucked into an existing template. I led the design and development of the template, but realized each piece of content still needed to be formatted and have graphics included. By the time I stopped working on the eHobbies site, I'd personally created over 600 pages and had a hand in easily 200 more.

I hired a staff of four producers, and the five of us expanded the site from six hobby categories to more than a dozen. I trained the first two producers and supervised the training of the latter, fully acquainting them all with the style guide, image and font specs and the way we did things. It was also my responsibility to create and maintain a production schedule, organizing the site's updates and dividing them amongst the producers. I created an HTML template for our editorial staff to use and trained the first three of our five editors on how to use it, freeing up my staff (as well as myself) for more graphic editing and content integration. During our content-sharing deal with hobby publisher Kalmbach, I took Quark XPress documents from clients and reformatted them into HTML for web publication. I even took part in content creation, writing articles like a spotlight on diecast fighter jets and doing photo shoots to spice up content.

In April 2000, I was asked to lead a task force involved in the technical and design portions of our acquisition of NextPlanetOver.com from its bankrupted owners in San Francisco, at which point I handed all eHobbies production over to my four staff producers.