Design

I made my first website in 1995, using the school’s version of Photoshop, back when the only code a designer needed to know was HTML. I’ve been working in the Web industry since 1999 (starting as a student employee for my college), and I did the agency thing from 2006-2017. I spent five years as a design manager at a fast-paced agency in Kansas City, spending a lot of time designing myself, and the average conversion rate of our sites rose over 50% under my leadership.

I’m a big believer that design is a tool used to solve a business problem within a set of parameters. If you need more leads, that’s a design problem; if you need to improve your company image, that’s a design problem too. I’ve never met a client that wanted to pay people to express themselves—clients have problems and designers can solve them.

In addition to web, I’m also big on collaboration. I’ve written articles on how we can better understand each other, and, with experience in design, writing, front end, back end, and management, I quickly put together how we should be working together.

Who I’ve Worked With

PlattForm (now Thruline Marketing) / 2006-2014, designed websites for schools, including numerous conversion-oriented landing pages

Intouch Solutions / 2014-2018, consulted with design department on technical capabilities and usability, designed some internal tools

Blue Rivet / 2018, did some design work for the company’s corporate site

NIC, Inc. / 2019-current, primary UX Designer on a web application used to build solutions for governmental agencies

Creative Philosophy

Step 1: Define success as a metric

Before any creative decisions are made, you need to know what success means for a project, and it needs to be measurable. If you want more email sign-ups, that's a much different goal than if you want to increase user engagement with your content.

Step 2: Use data to inform creative decisions

Once you know what you’re going to be measuring, every creative decision should be geared toward improving that number, and preferably backed up with data. There’s data out there on what converts and what doesn’t. If you don’t have data, do some A/B testing and get some.

Step 3: Measure, measure, measure

Once a project launches, that’s when the real work begins. You now have a baseline—a score for your site. That number needs to get better every six months. Measure the success of every new change, and don’t be afraid to test new things to see if they help further your goal.