Objectives
To continue creating exciting web content in a creative & collaborative atmosphere.
Education
University of New Mexico Liberal Arts
9/92 to 12/95

New York University Art History
5/94 to 9/94

Experience
Powells.com (powells.com)
2220 NW Industrial Portland, Oregon
503.228.4651 x 5817
2/07 — present

Title: Front End Developer

Job Description: I've worked at Powells.com for a couple of years now, my job title is "Front End Developer," which means that I am responsible for the users experience on powells.com, which really just translates to getting the programmers and the marketers on the same page...

Currently getting my hands dirty with: Putting together the pieces to make a powells.com mobile site, creating / structuring our APIs (javascript search, product info, inventory info, content, and recommendations), and making plugins for, and migrating content to, WordPress (our new content management system).

Job Highlights:

  1. Checkout: Redesigned the flow, simplified the UI and added an address book to the checkout process. How'd it work? Well, conversion is up approximately 30% inside the checkout process itself.
  2. Search - designed/implemented advanced search functionality and search results themselves.
  3. Locations: It's been a long time coming, but now, along with all the info you need about our locations, you can get staff picks from the actual people who work at those locations. That should be fun...

    Under the hood stuff: Wordpress plugin that allows users to enter, edit, and delete their location, and on the front end, connect them with user-location-based staff picks.

  4. And, speaking of mixed metaphors, turn the pages of the Holiday Calendar, on your computer??!? It's the 2007 Holiday Catalog.

    PLEASE NOTE: Catalog is being served locally so all 'add-to-cart' functionally is no longer working.

 

Willamette Week Newspaper (wweek.com)
2220 NW Quimby Portland, Oregon
503.243.2122
3/01 — 2/07

Title: Head of Web Development/Design

Job Description: Responsible for all CMS (content management systems), art direction and production for the main site (wweek.com) & all of its ancillary web sites (personals, the food finder, musicfestnw.com, etc. and for creation & maintenence of all password protected data entry and retrieval systems.

Job Highlights:

  1. Launched a major overhaul of the site to a PHP/mySQL back-end, which proved to be much faster and more reliable.
  2. Redesigned the front-end of the site (look+feel), increasing page views from about 18K to upwards of 40K a week.
  3. MusicFestNW Radio Player. They have taken down the music data (this radio read the scheduling database for the festival), so here it is with some mp3's I had laying around...
  4. Creation of a CMS that allowed music editors to enter all music information on a password protected section of the web-site that, at the end of the week, allowed editors to "flow out" all the music information (via created-on-the-fly XML files [file no longer active]) directly into inDesign templates. This saved hours a week for both the music- and the copy editors.

    It also delivered me from about five (soul-killing, copy-and-paste filled) hours of drudgery per week.

  5. advertise.wweek.com - Media Kit one sheet.

Localcut.com (localcut.com)
2220 NW Quimby Portland, Oregon
503.243.2122
3/01 — 2/07

An off-shoot site of the Willamette Week (wweek.com), localcut.com was designed as an extension of the music section that could highlight more people and voices from the music community.

Job Description: Worked with Art Director on the graphics/look & feel, did all the coding and graphic production.

We used WordPress, an open source (php) blogging system. After many hours under the hood, modifying it to meet our specific needs (starting almost from scratch, the skeleton theme), the site launched on time and under budget.

Job Highlights:

  1. localcut.wweek.com/calendar - Using the CMS I spoke of earlier, I developed a set of scripts that reformatted the data into the Wordpress databases. This content also got turned into XML documents that got "flowed out" to the production department, and dropped, print-ready, into inDesign documents.
  2. localcut.wweek.com - Hand-rolled a caching system such that the pages write themselves every hour, making for less load on the server and pages being served up faster.

 

Freelance
Smash Web Comic (smashcomic.com)
8/11

Freelance: Site Programming/ Wordpress theme-ing and plugins.

Job Description: Built Wordpress theme and set of plugins to feature this web-only comic. UPDATE: Hey, they got a book deal!

Skill Set
HTML (hand coded and/or WYSIWYG - Dreamweaver)
PHP (+ frameworks WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.)
mySQL
perl
Subversion Version Control (SVN)
ruby (+ rails)
javaScript (+ libraries jQuery, MooTools, prototype)
Flash Actionscripting
All Adobe graphic apps (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, InCopy, etc.)
Contact
CJ Stritzel
Front End Developer powells.com
503.754.5445
cj@powells.com

View C.J. Stritzel's profile on LinkedIn