Here is a rough list of some projects I have worked on over the last 8 years. Some projects are not included due to confidentiality concerns. However, please look through the projects below and feel free to check out my resume.

Sep 2007Five Point Studios

Five point studios is a professional piercing and custom tattoo shop in Johnston, IA. I was given the opportunity to revamp their severely outdated web site.

I programmed the site so that the shop could add/edit any page as well as add/edit staff members and staff portfolio images.

In the design I incorporated one of the shop's tattoo sketches. The shop also wanted a very artistic font in their design. And as with any web site, if the visitors don't have your font installed, they won't see your fancy text. So, using PHP's GD library, I wrote functionality to dynamically load their font and create fancy title images on the fly.

The site will be much more successful in allowing Five Point to show off the incredible work that consistantly comes out of their shop.

tags: CSS, Graphic Design, HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: http://www.5pointbody.com

Jul 2006515 Alive

515 Alive is an urban music festival that takes place in Des Moines, IA. We donated this simple dynamic informational site to relay event times and locations.

The site's simplicity is largely due to the very short deadline and last minute event changes.

I worked closely with a designer for some of the elements.

tags: CSS, Graphic Design, HTML, JavaScript
url: n/a

May 2006Aeon Grey

I built this site for Aeon Grey, a Des Moines hip hop artist, to promote both himself and his 5th solo album: Primate Curriculum.

Aeon Grey wanted a very lite site that would include a forum and also allow him to publish photos, videos, and mp3s. The site's news is integrated with the forum to allow Aeon to display important updates on the home page. I worked with the graphic designer, Mindy Hoskin, for the graphic elements, which are taken primarily from the album art that she designed.

I also do some of Aeon Grey's photography and videography. We plan on starting a music video soon.

tags: CSS, Graphic Design, HTML, MySQL, PHP, Video Production
url: http://www.aeongrey.com

Apr 2006derek.broox.com v5

After working with Truespin Media on several professional sites, I finally felt I gained enough experience to completely rewrite derek.broox.com. I didn't want to rewrite the site until I was absolutely sure that I was writing extremely solid code that would actually make the site function better - not just look different.

Visually there isn't a whole lot of difference between this release and version 4, however the back-end was completely rewritten.

With the complete recoding of derek.broox.com I greatly enhanced several features of the site. A few of the those include: tagging, photo handling, database calls, and paging. This version of the site is much much lighter, much quicker, and a lot more clean.

tags: CSS, HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: http://derek.broox.com

Mar 2006Truespin Media v2

Truespin Media is a partnership that my friend, Nick Leeper, and I started up. After realizing that we were mainly focusing on web design and not the other services we offered, we decided to redesign the site.

This version of our site is much lighter and contains only relevant information.

With this release we also drastically updated our portfolio - with all the work we were doing, we didn't have enough time to update our own site!

tags: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, PHP
url: http://www.truespin-media.com

Mar 2006Solid Grind v2

I re-released Solid Grind to get away from the extreme sports feel of the site. There are so many other extreme sports sites with a full staff dedicated to maintaining them - I decided to go back to Soap Shoes. No one else has this thorough of a site dedicated to Soap Shoes.

I worked with Nicole Sutherland on the design of this site, which turned out to work very well for the content being delivered.

The new version of the site is much more complete, the code is all much more efficient, and photo manipulation is handled 10 times better. With the initial version of SolidGrind I was very proud of the photo management system - this system blows it away. It is much more versatile in that most image manipulation is done on the fly.

tags: AJAX, CSS, Graphic Design, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, PHP
url: http://www.solidgrind.com

Jan 2006Rebels Advocate

Rebels Advocate is a Midwest Hip Hop group that got together in Iowa City. With their gaining popularity they decided they needed a strong web presence to show the world what they are all about.

Rebels Advocate was referred to my partnership needing both a web site and a music video. With a very limited budget, we had to cut a lot of corners, but the results of both the video and the web site are very pleasing. The site allows visitors to check out their bio, video, photos, and most importantly, their music. We also installed a community driven forum to keep visitors coming back to the site and a statistic program in order to track the site's hits.

tags: CSS, Graphic Design, HTML, MySQL, PHP, Video Production
url: http://www.rebelsadvocate.com

Apr 2005Des Moines Alive

Des Moines Alive is a personal project that Nick Leeper and I developed to help Des Moines Area people find new and cool places to go. We focus primarily on restaurants and bars but we also give information on local sports and recreation. One of the best features is that the site allows visitors to review any of the locations listed.

We designed Des Moines Alive to be very lite and easy to navigate. The goal is to provide our visitors with the information they need as quickly as possible.

At only a year old the site is getting 2,000 - 3,000 hits per day and has had over 650 reviews submitted. Des Moines Alive has also been featured in local print media.

tags: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, PHP
url: http://www.desmoinesalive.com

Mar 2005Iowa Business Alliance

Iowa Business Alliance came to my partnership with a design in place. They needed our skills to bring their vision to life. We gave them a useful, updateable website that they could use to attract potential clients.

Technologies used for this solution were HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, and MySQL.

tags: CSS, HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Jan 2005Iowa Retail Federation

Iowa Retail Federation came to my partnership needing a refreshing of their current site. The information on their site was good, but they needed a way to manage it easily and efficiently. We worked with them to provide a website that met their current and future needs.

tags: HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Nov 2004derek.broox.com v4

This version of derek.broox.com was simply a reason to get a better grasp and further understanding of design with Cascading Style Sheets.

Initially, I focused mainly on design and minimal back-end changes. I definitely accomplished what I set out for in that I learned a great deal about using CSS effectively. Most of the other changes with this release were simply content changes.

Major back-end code additions included tagging and paging for photos and other site content.

Throughout this design's life there were several add-ons made. Some were back-end changes, most were content changes.

tags: CSS, Graphic Design, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Nov 2004Iowa Meth Watch

Iowa Meth Watch (local partner of the Meth Watch program) approached my partnership seeking a similar site to the national Meth Watch site. The main difference was to include more personalization, relation, and focus to the State of Iowa. We recreated graphics, created and enhanced flash animations, cleaned up code, and added new text to help integrate the state of Iowa into the Meth Watch program.

tags: CSS, HTML
url: http://www.iowamethwatch.com

Nov 2004Soft Focus Art

Soft Focus Art is a local Hip Hop and DJ group who came to my partnership with a limited budget and hope for a very complex web site. They wanted a database driven site in order to update their viewers with upcoming shows, bios, media, and news; but they also wanted to keep the look fairly simple with crisp lines and have everything displayed via Flash animation. We helped them out and provided a simple animated design with a powerful back-end using PHP, MySQL, and XML for easy updating.

tags: Flash, Graphic Design, HTML, MySQL, PHP, XML
url: http://www.softfocusart.com/

Oct 2004Falaphilia

On october 14th 2004, Bill O'Reilly from Fox News was threathened with a sexual harrassment lawsuit. A typo was made on the lawsuit transcript. Instead of loufa the officer put falafel. Some friends and I found this hilarious so we put up a website talking about "Falaphilia."

Even though it started as a viral joke. We ended up having approximately 50,000 visitors in the first 48hrs and peaked at 100,000 visitors in the first week. We then switched it up and served large political content to the blogger demograph and pulled 3.7 terabytes of transfer in 5 days.

I handled the design of this site as well as some creative content, and made a graphic of O'reilly hugging a giant piece of falafel.

tags: CSS, Graphic Design, HTML
url: http://www.falaphilia.com

Jun 2004Trek For Kids

Trek For Kids is a fundraising bike ride for The Boys and Girls Club of Dane County; the web site provides information about the ride, lets people register to ride, and also lets people make pledges to the riders.

A friend of mine contacted me to contract out the development for part of this site. Shortly after, my partner and I were hired for the job by a company in Madison, WI. We were to design and program the rider registration, pledge donations, and full administration/reporting tools. Since this site requires credit card use, both, the registration and donation sections run from a secure server and use encryption in order to ensure protection for the visitors. The administration panel lets Trek For Kids manage users, teams, donations, etc. It also gives them full reporting to keep them up to date on how many have registered, which riders are on which teams, and how the pledges stand.

tags: HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Jun 2004SAE Long Beach

A friend of mine from the The Long Beach chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon contacted me seeking some add-ons to their currently designed site. In this add-on, they wanted an administration system to allow for easy updating and management of active members, alumni, alumni job postings, dues, a calendar of events, etc.

My partner and I were able to provide them with a very user-friendly administration panel to manage all of this data. SAE also wanted a photo gallery and forum which we installed and fit 2 previously built systems for. The site now displays all of this database driven information in a very organized manner.

tags: HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Apr 2004Vedanta Gallery

Vedanta is an Art Gallery located in Chicago, IL. They approached my partnership seeking a PHP add-on to their current site, which lists past, current, and upcoming exhibition details. The system we designed allows them to easily and quickly add and manage exhibitions through an administration system.

All exhibition information is managed by a PHP/MySQL backend. The front end allows visitors to quickly access information and photos for current, upcoming, and past exhibitions at the gallery.

Since the release of this site the gallery has changed their name - however I believe they are still using the web system we built.

tags: HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Feb 2004Regulatory Solutions Inc

When Regulatory Solutions Inc. wanted to get an online presence established, they approached my partner and I to help them get started. Their site's purpose is to provide a large amount of regulatory information to their customers in a quick and simple fashion. To accomplish this, we designed an easy-to-use, flexible system that allows users to retrieve their information as quickly as possible.

We also designed an administrative system to provide Regulatory Solutions Inc. with the same quick and simple service for updating the site. The system allows them to easily add and manage users, documents, and updates. This enables their customers to get the most up-to-date news to help with their regulatory decision making.

tags: HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Jan 2004Truespin Media

Truespin Media is a company that my friend, Nick Leeper, and I started up. We originally planned on offering several services including: video production, photography, graphic design, and web design. However, we've focused primarily on the last 2.

tags: HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: http://www.truespin-media.com

Oct 2003We Own The Sun

One day, a couple friends and I decided to claim the sun. So we quickly designed this web site to let the world know that "we own the sun."

The site we created sells plots of the sun as real estate and donates part of the profits to cancer research.

I was in charge of the site's design and some of the creative content.

tags: CSS, Graphic Design, HTML
url: http://www.weownthesun.com

Oct 2003Learn To Yo-Yo

Learn to Yo-Yo is a site dedicated to teaching kids new yo-yo tricks. Pro yo-yoers update the site with video and tutorials.

My job in this project was to simply come up with a lite front end design, which you can see displayed here.

tags: CSS, Graphic Design, HTML
url: n/a

Sep 2003derek.broox.com v3

This version of derek.broox.com was mostly just content/design changes. I added audio, videos, a biography, and links to my friends' sites.

One cool addition was that on the homepage I made the random photo of myself change to photos of my friends when you hovered over their links.

tags: Graphic Design, HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

May 2003Solid Grind

SolidGrind is the site that took over the former Broox Extreme (www.broox.com). I wanted to use broox.com as a hub with links to all of my web sites; in order to do this, I had to come up with a new extreme sports site. After I came up with the name and domain, I decided that I wanted to code the entire thing from scratch, rather than customize a prebuilt system. Coding the entire site has paid off numerous times; I now have full control and understanding of the system and can add on, fix bugs, and rebuild very easily.

One of the most complex parts of SolidGrind was the "feature pic" system. It allowed users to upload pictures to be reviewed by the administrators I hired. These pictures were queued in a database and could be viewed by the administrators. If we saw one we liked, we simply clicked a button to set it as the feature pic. This button contained functionality to automatically adjust the size of the image, add a SolidGrind.com watermark to each image, create a thumbnail of the image, store it in the database, and place the picture on the homepage until a new picture is added. In addition, I designed it so that each picture has to be featured for at least 24 hours; this gives everyone a fair amount of time on our frontpage.

Besides photos, the site featured news, forums, tutorials, videos, and several other things related to extreme sports.

tags: Graphic Design, HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Mar 2003The Jugglers

Three years after the original site had gone live Harper Reed hired me to do another design.

The new site is basically a blog running movable type to update Jugglers in the Chicago area about upcoming events.

tags: CSS, Graphic Design, HTML
url: http://www.thejugglers.org

Jan 2003Wireless Wallpapers

Wireless Wallpapers is a personal project that I have chose to take on. It was a site that allowed users to download color wallpapers for their color screened mobile phones.

At the time there were several sites offering this service however nearly all of them only supported one type of phone or charged money for each wallpaper downloaded (usually $1.00 per wallpaper). Wireless Wallpapers allowed users to download unlimited wallpapers for free, which were available for several types of phones. The free wallpapers had a tiny "wirelesswallpapers" watermarks near the bottom of the image, however if the user paid a small fee each month, they could get more features (such as private wallpapers) and the watermark was removed. In addition to this, I wrote a function to allow users to upload their own images to the website which gave me the ability to let the site run itself. The function I wrote automatically resized the image they uploaded into wallpaper size and printed my watermark to the image on its own. The site was a huge sucess and learning experience. The first day it was online it received 7,000 hits and had nearly 100 users. After the first week there were nearly 50,000 hits and 500 users. Upon selling the site, I had over 24,000 users and received over 3,200,000 hits.

tags: Graphic Design, HTML, MySQL, PHP, WAP
url: n/a

Dec 2002James H. Laas Company

I developed this site for the James Laas Company out of Bettendorf, Iowa. It was one of the largest, most complex, and complete systems that I have built.

Prior to my development, they made all of their updates via HTML - a database was very much needed. They have a huge amount of information which became quite redundant in the way that they were displaying it.

I designed a more aesthetically pleasing site that used a PHP/MySQL back-end. With the new design, I concentrated mostly on the ease of navigation and finding vital information quickly, which was successfully attained. Their site is now completely free of FTP and is updateable via an administration section in which I created. The database has proven to be very useful as the James Laas company writes several articles per month. This site is also the home of the first "site wide" search engine that I have built. Jhlaas.com was a huge success and a great learning experience.

tags: CSS, Flash, Graphic Design, HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: http://www.jhlaas.com

Nov 2002Kronus Films

This is a design that I completed while working for NaTa2 Productions. The client, Kronus Entertainment, is a film production company specializing in underwater video shooting. At the time, they were working on breaking an underwater world record as a fund-raiser. The goal is to make a 100 mile trip around an island which will be approximately 24 hours underwater; the money raised was used to assist ill children. Kronus has a variety of extremely powerful equipment and talented personnel.

They came to us needing a professional web site to portray their image and draw more attention to their company.

tags: CSS, Graphic Design, HTML
url: http://www.kronusfilms.com

Oct 20023G Screen Saver

3g Screen Saver is another site that Harper Reed hired me to design. The site's purpose is to host screensavers and ringtones for Sprint phones. Harper wanted a design with blue and silver colors, a picture of a sprint phone, and an area for banner ads. The rest of the site was to be very lite.

The finished product turned out very nice and the site became a huge success for Harper.

tags: Graphic Design, HTML
url: n/a

Sep 2002Lujack's SUV Trails

I designed this site for Lujack's Northpark Auto Plaza, where I previously held my internship. Lujack's is the fist dealership in the country to have their own SUV offroad test track. This track has several obstacle's to test the performance of sport utility vehicles.

The screenshot shown is a portion of the virtual map I built for Lujack's. When a user holds their mouse over an obstacle a description is shown in the description box; if an obstacle is clicked on, a small video clip will be played in Quicktime format.

tags: Graphic Design, HTML, JavaScript, Video Production
url: n/a

Sep 2002Lujack Intranet

I held an internship at Lujack's Northpark Auto Plaza for the month of September 2002. During this month one of my projects was to build an intranet system to allow administrators to post news and happenings within the plaza. The site uses a PHP/MySQL back-end to submit news, and also to display uploaded articles. Since the people who will be administering the site don't know much about web design, I've made this site as simple and fool proof as possible. They are currently using the intranet system and it is proving to be very helpful for relaying information throughout the plaza.

tags: HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Aug 2002The Simple Truth @ Cornell College

This is one of the many sites I built while on the Cornell College student webteam. It is probably my favorite, due to the deadlines and how well everything worked out. First of all, I had a 4 day deadline on this project. Cornell introduced a new marketing scheme to give students information about the college, which was titled "The Simple Truth." The college had hundreds of pamphlets printed out, which they would send to everyone who visited truth.cornellcollege.edu. On top of that we even had an advertisement going into U.S. News, which had a link to the site I was supposed to build (hence the short deadline).

The site was only to be 1 page long, had to open in a static sized window, and needed to have a PHP based form to insert information into a database. On top of all of that, they wanted flash animation for the header. The screenshot pictured is simply of the flash animation.

tags: Flash, HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Jan 2002Spanish Flashcards

I made this web application for a computer science class at Cornell. One of the projects suggested was a flashcard program written in the language of our choice. Needless to say, I chose PHP/MySQL in a heartbeat.

The program allowed users to choose whether they wanted to test their vocabulary from English to Spanish or from Spanish to English. I wrote functionality that retrieves random words from the database every time they choose a new card. Once a card is selected it is marked as 'viewed'. This would make sure the program goes through every card before it repeats one of the previous ones. It was also designed so the user could choose which type of words they wanted to learn. They could select from adjectives, nouns, verbs, or all at once.

tags: HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Jan 2002derek.broox.com v2

Version 2 of derek.broox.com was the first version on the subdomain: derek.broox.com. Prior to that my personal site resided at www.broox.com.

This version was mostly just a content/design change. I added some random photo functionality to the site that would load random pictures of me in the homepage header, and random pictures of other things on other pages. Other than that, not much changed between the first version and this version.

tags: CSS, Graphic Design, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Oct 2001Broox Extreme

Broox Extreme was the former version of SolidGrind.com, it was an extreme sports website that included 6 categories: bmx, inline, scooter, skateboard, snowboard, and soap. Each section had the latest news and information along with user submitted photos and videos.

I hired several authors who specialized in at least one category of the site to help me keep everyone informed of what's going on.

Almost a year after the site was released (October 2001), broox.com received over 700,000 hits and had nearly 700 registered users. Upon closing, the site was just shy of 1 million hits.

YM (Your Magazine) found this site and contacted me in order to feature some of my "Soaping Buddies" and I. They flew out from New York to do a day long photoshoot of us "Soaping." We were all featured in the April, 2002 of YM magazine!

tags: CSS, Graphic Design, HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Jul 2001derek.broox.com v1

Before I started Broox Extreme, my personal site resided at broox.com.

This was my very first PHP driven personal site and blog. It was also the home of my first random picture generator which displayed new images on the side each time a page would load.

tags: CSS, Graphic Design, HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

Sep 2000BrooksFSW

BrooksFSW was a site dedicated to Soap Shoes, a company that makes shoes capable of sliding across objects such as handrails, benches, etc. The activity of "soaping" is very similar to grinding with inline skates or skateboards. I have done promotional work for Soap Shoes for several years - this site was a huge part of that.

BrooksFSW was a portal site using PHP Nuke to develop a community for "Soapers." It kept users informed on the latest news and happenings with the company. It also kept everyone involved in friendly competition with photos, polls, forums, and videos. This was the first site I ran that used an extensive PHP and MySQL back-end.

BrooksFSW was an excellent learning experience for me. My mentor, Harper Reed, helped tremendously with the initial setup and training. It was released in September 2000 and integrated into Broox Exteme in October 2001. During that year it received nearly 620,000 hits and had 800 registered users. The site also had 441 news articles published and over 6,000 comments on those articles.

BrooksFSW received some great recognition from large medias such as the British Broadcasting Corporation, The Mount Vernon Sun, The Rock Island Dispatch, and the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

Disclaimer: Since BrooksFSW has been released from my posession, another company has decided to purchase the domain name, due to its high popularity. The company now owns BrooksFSW and has used the domain to display various advertising and pornographic material. I suggest you not visit the new BrooksFSW and simply look at the screenshot displayed here. I also have no affiliation with the current owner of the website and assure you that everything on my portfolio is safe for your viewing.

tags: Graphic Design, HTML, MySQL, PHP
url: n/a

2001PAAC

PAAC (Performing Arts and Activities Council) is an organization at Cornell College that organized all entertainment on campus. I was hired as a technician and web master for the 2001-2002 school year. As technician I was in charge of setting up and running all audio/video equipment at our events. As web master I had complete reign over the site.

When I first joined this group the site was programmed via Macromedia Dream Weaver and was quite simple. I recreated the site from scratch, giving it a more uniform, professional look that was very easy to navigate. I also integrated some Flash animation for aesthetics.

The color scheme may not not have been the best, but it was our school colors and the overall layout turned out very nice.

tags: CSS, Flash, Graphic Design, HTML
url: n/a

2001Computing Services

While at Cornell, I worked for Computing Services - the department that managed all of Information Technology. As part of my work-study I was hired to design a site for our department. It was my first experience with coding web sites with things other than straight HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I used some perl and several included .nav files for easy navigation manipulation.

My main duty was to fix old links, remove unwanted content, add new content, and update various items throughout. Due to such a large amount of changes, I ended up recoding most of the site from scratch. Everything except for the RESnet section was my work. At the time, if you saw a little "x" at the bottom of the page - I programmed it. Cornell's entire site has since been redesigned and my pages are not there.

tags: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Perl
url: n/a

2001Advantage Group

The Advantage Group is an investment company based in Cedar Rapids Iowa. They were a client for one of my employers and hired me to do their web site. This site was fairly simple but needed to be extremely clean, professional, and still be able to relay a large amount of information to the reader.

The site turned out just as planned and served as a great tool for The Advantage Group. It has since been redesigned to meet new technologies and features.

tags: Graphic Design, HTML
url: n/a

2000Kappa Theta

Kappa Theta is a female social group at Cornell College - Cornell's equivalent to a Sorority. The women of Kappa Theta hired me to design a simple informational web site. After designing the site, I trained one of the women to update the content via Macromedia Dream Weaver.

It turned out to be a very useful tool to easily communicate the message, purpose, and goals of the group. 5 years later, I ended up marrying one of them!

tags: Graphic Design, HTML
url: n/a