Last week I was asked by Jason Finnerty, who is a contributing writer to freelanceswitch.com and owner of Brandscaping if I would be interested in answering a few questions for the website. Being a long time reader and commenter of FreelanceSwitch I of course said yes! The interview was posted the other day and you can read it by clicking the image below or clicking here.

Thanks again to Jason and Freelance Switch for this opportunity!

Hello All - I find myself explaining this portfolio site to quite a few people because I am a Full Time Flash developer, but my website only has 2 Flash applications on it. This is because I use this site to display my freelance work which is typically website design and development and I don't ever really show off the work I do at my job. So everyone is just going to have to trust me when I say that I am a Flash Developer and have been since 2004! You can checkout my companies site to see some examples of the products I work on (I also built the website) at www.qagraphics.com. Below is a seasons greetings card I built last year for QA Graphics, we had a snowfall of 16" and no one could go to work, which was the first time I have ever had a "snow day" for work. well since i was stuck inside (literally) i decided to make a little flash snowball fight game for a greeting card and figured i would post it here. enjoy

alright it has been a few weeks since I have posted a finished site! this one was pretty fun, i got hired to do all of the design and development (which is always nice). the site is also going to have a shopping cart in the near future! The company is really awesome, they sell kits to teach kids how to run a business, takes them through everything from product development, buying supplies, figuring out income/expenses, and sales/marketing of the final product! click here to check the site out

Hello all - dont you hate it when someone who has a blog just leaves it for 3 whole weeks witout posting anything? i know i do and right now i am super guilty of it! things have been crazy, we have been on a finshing/golfing trip to minnesota with my family, a camping trip to Clear Lake, Iowa with Kells family, my cousins wedding, then we got water in our basement from the crazy rain we have been having in central iowa... so just one thing after another! ...but I have tons to post over the next few days so hopefully we can tune everyone back in! everything from Desgin work, Freelance stories, Development projects, a few actual "hands on" projects, and some fun personal stuff too so stay tuned!



My Nephew Lane and I fishing at Rush Lake in Minnesota - Photo by Kelly

{gallery}minnesota-2010{/gallery}

Over lunch today we passed a stand where a guy was selling Bonsai trees and I decided to buy a small one. It is a Juniper Bonsai tree that is 3 years old. I don't really know much about them, but it says in the instructions that i got with it they can live up to 250 years and need to be watered every day and get 4 hours of sun per day... we will see how long i can keep this guy alive haha!

Kenny just sent me a picture of the Fitzpatrick Water & Plumbing truck with the logo I designed on the side. I think this might be the first logo I have ever designed that ended up on the side of a vehicle so that is really exciting for me. I think they are in the works of getting new company shirts and some other items branded with the new logo, I post pictures of them as I get them!

Over the past weekend we went to the Des Moines Arts Festival and had a really good time (minus the 100 degree weather!). we did a couple laps around the  event and went in to pretty much every ones tent and checked out the artists work, saw a lot of really cool stuff and interesting people! the only art purchases we made were of the culinary type and my favorite had to be the funnel cake haha! anyway i suggest checking it out next year if you get the chance!

URL - http://www.desmoinesartsfestival.org/

This post is a little random! Kell and I do not have green thumbs at all but the last 2 years decided to give planting flowers a shot and here are some pictures of how they turned out!

I wrote about the shopping cart i was working on the other day and figured i would post and say that it is live and everything is working properly! ended up being a pretty painless process and i am excited to move on to the next one, so if you or anyone you know needs an online store built just let me know!

Yesterday my boss got us a sky box at the ICubs game for a team building day. the box was really nice and he had lunch catered in and some cold ones for us when we got there! the ICubs didnt end up winning but it was still a really fun day (especially for a monday!) Below is the view of the field from the door of our box (nice shot of the Capitol too)

Decided to order some books on application review and web content... I would say my least favorite thing about developing websites is content review and the few times I have to help write (especially my own!) so i got a book to hopefully help out and another for usability testing of my own applications!

    

I just got done converting the Advanced Supply website from a HTML site to a Joomla site. The people of Advanced Supply will now have the ability to easily update and edit their content and navigation. Surprisingly this re-build went fairly smooth compared to some of the Joomla conversions I have done in the past!

I have been working on an online payment system for the Job Prep 101 site that I put on here the other day and last night I got my first payment to work with no problems. I have worked on quite a few sites with shopping carts, but either they were setup by someone else or they were something easy like PayPal so last night setting up the site to accept payment using a credit card on the site was a first for me. I am still working on how the checkout process should go since the customer is actually paying to view a Webinar instead of a product... anyway I will post the end result hopefully this weekend or early next!

it has been 13 years since this original game came out and it is back for the Wii!

I have been working with this client over the last few weeks to get their site up and running and last night we pushed it live! This site design and development went pretty smooth and I had a great client to work with! Click on the thumbnail to learn more about the project

The site has been live for a couple of weeks, but i just now got around to adding it to my portfolio site. SIVA Interactive is my friend Kenny's marketing company, it is a pretty new start up with some serious things happening so be sure to check out their blog (click here). Along with the website I have done all of their branding and print materials.

Click here to find out more about this project

Kenny just sent me a cell phone picture of his SIVA business cards I designed for him. Below I posted the original design and his photo of how they turned out... there was a little mix up with the file that kenny sent to printer, it was supposed to have some text along the top and say "ken" intead of "Kenny", but no one calls him ken so its all good. All-in-all they turned out really nice and match the SIVA brand perfectly!

FINISHED PRODUCT (better picture coming soon)


ORIGINAL DESIGN

So back to work Tuesday and I have to say that this Memorial Day weekend was a success. I was super sick the whole week leading up to it and Friday night, but from Saturday on i was starting to feel better. the weekend consisted of Bonfires, baby pools, sun burns, golfing, wayy too many beers, and relaxing. Below was my attempt in grilling a homemade pizza, i have grilled Papa Murphy pizzas before but never on my own with no instructions... basically could have taken it off a couple of minutes earlier to avoid burning the bottom, but it turned out decent anyway... definitely not good enough to add to my portfolio haha ;)

So it isn't exactly a "new" project since I did it last year, but it is new to my portfolio. Feel free to interact with the application below (might take a few moments to load) or click here to view more details about the project.

Just posted a logo design I did for Fitzpatrick Water & plumbing in Hazleton, Iowa. Fitzpatrick is a customer of SIVA Interactive and are working on a full website and online marketing, should be some fun projects coming from them!

For not doing anything all day our dogs were sure tired yesterday... usually they are all pumped and crazy when i got home but this is how i found them yesterday!

PacMan is celebrating it's 30th birthday today and Google helped them celebrate by embedding the game on their site and adding a "Insert Coin" button. The cool thing is that you can play multiplayer by hitting insert coin twice and using the w a s z buttons to move mrs pacman... very cool!
 

Finally... I posted my first Adobe Flash example to my portfolio... I am a Flash developer and have been one since the beginning of 2004, but I don't post the work that I do at my full time job on here (which i am a Flash Developer) so it looks like I have no Flash examples to show. Basically between NDA's and not posting stuff I do for my current job and past jobs I have barely any Flash work to show so this is kind of exciting haha... Click here to go look at the Flash Radio station player that I animated for a customer last night

So todays Doodle doesn't exactly count as a doodle but i still thought it was funny enough to post (plus my last meeting was on site instead of a conference call). So this doodle is a 2 for 1 deal, just write what the worms are saying to each other!

Kenny just sent me an updated picture of my 125r with the bars, grips, brakes, and standard byke padset... this thing is so close to being done! getting really pumped!