Electronics

I was actively involved in the world of electronics from about 1970 to about 1980. Though I have maintained a big interest and passion for this subject, I haven't been employed in it for over 25 years, and a lot has changed in that time.

I am still familiar with most of the terminology, and what, in general, the technology is capable of. If you have an unusual or one-off application that you need help on, let me know. I'll be honest if it's way over my head.

I can deliver a schematic that might work for you, or one tested using breadboarding, or a documented piece of custom equipment. I would normally charge by the hour for this type of work.

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Websites

I learned HTML (and XHTML) in 2009 and have been using it quite a lot, along with CSS to keep up with modern practice. I don't have a lot of experience in web design yet, but then I don't charge that much, either. If you just need a design roughed out, or have an idea but don't have time to play with it yourself, get in touch with me.

Programming

I would likewise be considered a beginner in the field of programming. On the other hand, I was playing around with C and QBasic on DOS machines before a lot of the new generation of programmers were born.

If you need some C# or VB code and just don't want to mess with it yourself, or want to see how some PHP might improve your website functionality, I might be able to help out.

Check out my old site for more details.

This website is a subdomain offered as a free service by the hosting company. As such, no special server-side features are supported. So this site is all XHTML and CSS. I have played around with JavaScript a bit, but prefer not to use it unless it is obviously needed in a design. A lot of the "dynamic" features of modern websites implemented by JavaScript don't impress me that much, and seem to be used mostly as marketing gimmicks.

The "business card" on the front page is formatted using a table. If it looks bad in your browser I would be interested to know about that. The whole table is in a div for CSS purposes, and it is positioned on the page using padding settings in the parent div. The background photo used in the page div is of a full moon.

The content pages are also formatted using tables. I like to keep absolute widths and absolute positioning to a minimum, though I know this is not the current style. This creates a web experience that is decidedly different than what we get when using the printed page.

I like to balance text with images or other graphical elements on a page. I have seen pages filled with tiny text, and they turn me off. A two-column format helps make reading easier, but is not natural on a web page. One handling I tried in my earlier design was to make a column for illustrations and another for text. They don't always align perfectly, but with scrolling so easy to do on a web page, this isn't so crucial.

Of course, more complex tables can be used to control formatting, but this makes design (and re-design) more complicated especialy if you are using your own page-drawing routines.

I've seen a lot of sites made with Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, etc. They look great, but I really like being able to control all the code on a page. Maybe I'm old-fashioned. Or maybe I just have more of an art approach to web design, rather than a business approach.