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. Hosting, registration, renewals, maintenance, refactoring, and site updates are available in one package.

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 tons of information, texts, images, personality. "Go to it!" she said. I had great fun building this; the site is never finished (the best kind). We incorporated the site into an interactive magazine, Prudentia, and it looks more like this (in 2009, anyway):

~ www.DeirdreMcCloskey.com books

Deirdre is a prolific writer and her books -- especially the latest chapters of the 6-volume tome on Bourgeois Virtues, are always eagerly awaited. In the Prudentia magazine, we began a books online section. New chapters are published generally once a week. (Because they are in final draft form, copyright infringement is not an issue.) The presentation of the books is designed to best replicate the experience of normal reading. The books are also print-ready, that is, they are image-free with minimal header-footer print containing copyright and identification data. The footnotes are linked to the text (and vice versa). At the end of each chapter is a space for readers' comments (right).

~ 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 several times.

~ 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 few 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.com 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!

~ 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 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 interactive home page 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. Unfortunately, the site was eventually considered too "different" to be funded by the university as a separate entity. But my sites are always resurrectable.

~ 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 the whole look of the site can be changed without changing the main structure. The site is small, so the main navigation menu can be displayed in full.

~ www.academiavitae.nl

The long history of the website of the short-lived Academia Vitae University is too tedious to go into. The number of visions and revisions of the site is barely comprehensible, given the university's budget. Hope springs eternal, they say. The school is "on hold." We pray for its eventual success. At left is the initial design of an expensive Dutch web design firm. I was only responsible for recreating it. Very frustrating.

Screenshot of a page from a version I designed several years later. It was replaced by the vision of yet another expensive Dutch web design firm. A website does not a university (industry, firm, business) make.