Web designer, backend developer, usability and SEO consultant
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Hi, I’m Mike, and I am a second year student at Capilano U’s Interactive Design Program. I’ve lived in Vancouver, British Columbia for 13 years, and before that, I briefly lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Portland and Machias, Maine, and Kharkiv, Ukraine. My interests include amateur photography, movies, music, football, and the outdoors.

When I started the program, I had already had extensive experience with HTML, PHP, and MySQL, along with Adobe’s Photoshop and Dreamweaver. This program helped me discover the importance of good interactive design, and modern techniques for Web 2.0. The way I see it, there’s a good way of designing something, using aesthetics, function and usability in mind, and there are wrong ways, which can frustrate and annoy potential customers and users.

The important thing is to have a background plan. You can’t create Wordpress overnight, and there is a good reason this particular software has become so prominent. The creators of Wordpress had to sit down, extensively plan, draw, and imagine everything before a single line of code was written. That’s what sets good design apart from bad – a focus on planning, and keeping usability in mind.

Favorite Courses:

  • Advanced Web Authoring (PHP)
  • Usability Design and Testing
  • Database Development (MySQL)

Current Projects:

  • Turtle Fundraising – a site for a non-profit retreat center in Atlanta, Georgia
  • My Portfolio – be done soon, promise
  • Project CMS (working title) – designing my own CMS

Favorite Sites: