ellars.com

web: background

[glowing neon at O'Hare Airport in Chicago]

overview

This volume is an "alpha" release; that is, it is still being written! (You will know when this volume has reached its "final" release because this message will no longer appear.) Please excuse any debris you may come across, including broken links or missing content. Thanks.

This volume of my portfolio begins with some background information. The bulk is devoted to demonstrating my experience through personal sites, professional work, and general content development. Some of the web experiments I have cooked up over time are also on display. I conclude this volume with a discussion of my web design philosophy.

background

The part of the Internet we now call the World Wide Web -- the "WWW" or just "the web" -- is a "global hypertext system" first proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. (For a more detailed history of the World Wide Web, go to the source.)

I began college at USC in the fall of 1995 (about five years after TBL had developed the first browser and page editor for the World Wide Web.) One of the first courses I enrolled in that first semester of school was ARCH 407: Advanced Computer Applications in Architecture. The instructors required each student to create a web page to display work done for the class. After about fifteen minutes of explaining the basics of HTML, we were sent off to create our own web pages. I wrote the code for my first web page within a few hours and I have not looked back!

Since then, I have designed over two dozen web site concepts and developed at least a dozen of them into fully functional resources. Most of these web sites have been more-or-less personal in nature; that is, I created them to showcase my academic and professional work, demonstrate innovative possibilities for web sites, or just to stroke my ego. I created a few web sites for friends and co-workers, and a couple have been for-hire projects.

A look at my personal sites.

web: background

overview

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