College Portrait website

Today, we delivered the College Portrait website that I designed to UH.

The College Portrait website is a project that UH requested from our office in an unusually short time frame — two weeks to be exact. I was assigned the project because I was up to the challenge, and wanted to try my hand at another project that allowed me to design something outside of our college template.

UH CollegePortraits.org page
UH's CollegePortraits.org page that links to the website I designed.

UH was participating in a national initiative called CollegePortraits.org that provides information to prospective students about higher education institutions, and UH wanted its collegeportraits.org page to link to a specially designed website that gave other information about UH, without overwhelming the prospective student with the complicated process of applying to a major research institution.

College Portrait site
The UH College Portrait website I designed.

Prospective students who visit UH’s page on the CollegePortraits.org page, can click on buttons that take them to the College Portrait website I created that is on the uh.edu domain with the university’s official header and footer. Once on the website I created, students can find basic information about the nine basic aspects of UH that it wanted to promote on its CollegePortraits.org page. From each of these nine pages, students can click through photographs of actual UH students, faculty and staff to find out even more information.

The website I designed was delivered to UH on March 31, 2009.

June 26, 2011 update: Earlier this month, I noticed that the College Portrait website I designed for the university is no longer online, even though the College Portraits website still points to it. I have altered the links of this post to point to an archived version of the website served from my own server for my own portfolio purposes.

KPFT News website launches

Nine years ago, I started a website for KPFT News, a local news program that KPFT 90.1 FM was starting, after a long absence of not having local news on the plucky listener-sponsored radio station.

I maintained the website for a year on a strictly volunteer-only basis, providing a place for fellow participants to help me archive the stories we reported.

KFT News show 1
The July 11, 2002 show archive page.

At first, it was a basic HTML page with links to full articles.

KPFT News show 77
The July 2, 2003 show archive page.

Later, I gave it more of a newspaper design, with color. And a new logo. The design was made possible with tables. (Shudder).

It was 2003. And I had just recently graduated from UH with a journalism degree.

The website is still archived on KPFT’s web server, which I think is a very nice gesture to the amount of work we contributed to make it possible. I still believe the stories we told on that program — which continues to this day — tells the stories of Houston that aren’t told elsewhere.