On Website Development

Websites vary enormously in content, complexity, dynamics and frequency of management. Quotes are therefore individual. If you would like information, please submit an email inquiry or contact me by telephone.

The following examples represent distinctly different levels of effort, expertise and cost. By the time this page is published, the screen shots will likely be stale. As well they should be. Adding and updating pages keeps sites fresh, encourages return visitors, and most importantly boosts their search-engine rating via the Google algorithm.

~ www.DeirdreMcCloskey.com

Deirdre McCloskey is a world-renowned economist and wonderful to work with. The developer's dream, she offered oodles of information, articles, books, images, personality -- and said, "Go to it!" I had great fun building this; the site is never finished (the best kind). It now includes an interactive magazine, the Prudentia.

~ www.SpeakingOfEconomics.com

Arjo Klamer needed an interactive site to generate interest in his latest book, Speaking of Economics. For friend Arjo, anything, of course. His own site (see below) was my first, and launched the whole business of developing web sites. (But I couldn't have done it without the help and encouragement of my son, Jared.) The Speaking of Economics site, however, has had no hits. Why? Because there are more webpages than there are people on earth, and the possibility of stumbling upon one without a referral is -- well, you figure it out. I've written a letter of invitation (which in the case of TheEconomicConversation won thousands of hits) but Arjo has been too busy to deal with it. Alas.

~ www.TheEconomicConversation.com

(By now you've noticed that I have favorite images of my favorite professors.) The Economic Conversation was designed to showcase a ground-breaking approach to teaching economics. Mirroring its student-teacher dialogues, each page is interactive, allowing the public to comment on or criticize sections of the text. Comment boxes are integrated into each page to encourage dialogue and minimize technical skills required to participate in the blog. In its first two weeks, it captured more than 4000 hits. Success!

~ www.klamer.nl

This is a complex, content-rich, dynamic site employing CSS and Javascript. It has continual updates, on-call management, periodic upgrades, a detailed hits counter and occasional refactoring. The site has several hundred pages, intrinsic search capability, a site map and intelligent use of pre-cached images. Cost includes a monthly management fee.

Throughout the several years of klamer.nl's existence it has been remodeled. Today it looks like this.

~ www.TheOtherChigagoSchoolOfEconomics.com

This très cool site was developed to emphasize the excellence of Roosevelt's economic department and its rich intellectual history, which is sometimes overshadowed by that other little school of economics down the street. It reflects the grit of an inner city with reverberating with hip-hop, graffiti, and all the excitement that rises above its social problems. The Department of Economics "continues to be a center of excellence in the university, dedicated to socially responsible teaching, learning, and scholarship." The home page is interactive and was developed to capture the visitor's curiosity long enough to think, "Hey, there's something different about this place." Steve Ziliak, one of Roosevelt's finest economic professors, provided invaluable input for the site.

~ www.susanmacd.com

This site, of course, is the one you're navigating right now. PHP templates structure the pages and create identical headers and containers to hold changeable content. The beauty of templates and cascading style sheets is that, with little effort, the whole look of the site can be changed. The site is small, so the main navigation menu can be displayed in full.

~ www.academiavitae.nl

The Academia Vitae site involved no long-term management. Its layout, architecture, color scheme and logos were specified by the client, which was constraining and a bit frustrating. The site was designed as a front-end that would interact with a major databasing company. I rebuilt it several times since 2003, integrating two content management systems so that the AV staff can edit it.