Usually you’ll find someone who’s either a web designer or a web developer, but rarely do you find someone who is both. I’m weird that way. I studied computer science and programming, but I also attended art school in San Francisco—graphic design, to be specific. And both these skills are perfect for crafting killer websites!
Call me Webmaster…Interactive Designer…Programmer…SEO Specialist…Social Media Manager. All those titles fit, but my real passion is Usability and Front-end Design. The web changed when smartphones hit the market in 2007. It became a new medium that is very task-oriented. We book airline tickets on the web. Find driving directions. Settle a bet during dinner. We do things on the web, and that’s why usability is so important. A big part of usability is how things look and function. That’s front-end design, and that’s my passion—designing websites that are easy to use, fast and efficient.
None of this is new. I’ve been working in the web since the mid-90s. It’s my passion…although my wife labels it an addiction. My clients span the United States, but California is home.
I am currently available for freelance projects, consulting and contract work. Give me a call at 916-710-8989, or send me an email: hello@tycahill.com.
Tech Talk
Learning is something I enjoy. Over the years I’ve tried many different technologies, programming languages, libraries and frameworks. The foundation of it all is HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The web doesn’t work without those three. Here’s the laundry list of buzzwords I work with on a daily basis.
- AngularJS – an excellent front-end framework from Google for building web applications.
- Ember – another front-end framework for building web applications.
- jQuery – although a lot can be done with plain vanilla JavaScript, the jQuery library speeds up development and takes care of most cross-browser problems.
- WordPress – yes, with over 17 million websites running WordPress, it’s a good choice for basic websites and blogs.
- Sitecore CMS – this is an enterprise-level content management system running on .NET.
- Visual Studio, C# and .NET – Microsoft’s programming tools, language and framework for building all kinds of applications for the web or desktop.
- SQL Server and MySQL – relational databases.
- Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and the rest of Adobe’s Creative Cloud – that’s the designer half of me!
- Foundation Framework and Twitter Bootstrap – both excellent frameworks for responsive web design.