Hi, I'm Christina

Simply put, I’m a web developer who works for individuals, businesses and advertising agencies who prefer to have someone else add functionality to their websites and web applications.

I authored my first website back when website development meant HTML syntax and tables. Today I leverage HTML5, CSS, jQuery, PHP and other tools to help my clients put their best foot forward with robust, yet user-friendly websites and web applications.

CONCEPT TO COMPLETION CASE STUDY:

The Virginia Department of Forestry

In 2021, I designed, developed, and architected the new Virginia Department of Forestry (DOF) website. Like many state agencies, the previous website was out of date in terms of technology and content. The staff experienced many longstanding issues they were eager to resolve.

Primary Concerns:
The Virginia Department of Forestry

A primary concern was not just a fresh new look, but also maintaining the hundreds of forms, documents, and brochures available to the public. The goal was to make those documents easy to locate and keep them up-to-date.

Also critical was helping the Virginia public easily find the forester that services their location. Since most existing agency directories were in alphabetical order, the process of finding the right person often involved multiple calls, long waits, and much frustration.

Lastly, for the website to remain current, it would need to be maintained by many departments and people of various skill levels. Making maintenance easy, and carefully and selectively providing users access to the backend was important. Because of the ease-of-use, I selected WordPress as the platform for this redesign.

Solution:
Resource Library

To maintain the DOFs more than 1200 documents, I implemented a robust Resource Library. Each resource (the forms, brochures, maps, logos, digital resources, and so on ) was entered into the library and tagged and categorized by the DOF staff. A thumbnail image was generated dynamically to avoid them having to create their own. Once entered, the resource will appear anywhere that the tags or categories were referenced. Updating documents is a matter of looking for the existing entry and uploading the new file.

A variety of shortcodes were built so that the web page editors could pull in subsets of the library either by category, tag, ID, or combination. Taxonomies were also added to differentiate between public and private documents. This was important because part of the development effort was a protected intranet site that exists as part of the public site.

Solution:
Find a Forester

I built an HR module to support a new public Agency Directory. Like the Resource Library, the public can now locate individuals by name, location, keyword, or department. Additionally, by using custom taxonomies, the DOF staff could tag the appropriate employees as either Primary or Secondary Foresters for the county they serve.

That custom taxonomy is referenced prominently on the homepage as a select box. The Virginia public can simply choose their country, click Search, and immediately see the person they need to call.

Solution:
Robust Role Management & Training

During the discovery process, user roles were identified for the individuals who would be maintaining the various aspects of the website. This included roles for HR, Finance, Business Management, Procurement Officers, and those responsible for updating Daily Fire Danger reports.

Easy-to-follow tutorials, both written and quick start videos, were created for each role so those users would feel confident maintaining their portion of the website. For security, extreme care was also taken to ensure that these individuals could only access their specific area of the WordPress administrative area.

In Conclusion

The completed Virginia Department of Forestry website includes a fully functional resource library, an attractive and maintainable agency directory, an updated blog, an employee intranet, and many custom and plugin base modules including a business directory, glossary, procurement module, and community events module that serve both the public and internal uses.

Enhancements were made to the site map and navigation. A mega menu plugin was utilized to better organize the large number of pages. Special attention was given to the state forests, making them easier to locate and helping the public more easily visualize the available amenities at each location.

The completed website been praised by internal and external sources and many of the staff working on the site have commented about how easy it is to maintain.

Ala Carte Development Case Study:

Ticketing Solution

While I am most often tasked with taking sites from concept to completion, there are instances where I get to work in tandem with other talented developers. Whether it's assisting them with overflow work or jumping in to help solve problems, getting to collaborate is something I enjoy.

When pandemic restrictions began to ease in 2020, venues began reopening but with strict limitation on the number of people who could be together at one time. It created an interesting challenge for ticketing systems.

I was approached by the developer working with Preservation Virginia to help create a "pandemic friendly" ticketing solution flexible enough to accommodate each of the 5 historical properties they manage.

The primary requirement was to allow a set number of tickets to be available at regular time increments, the number of which would vary depending on each property. We needed blackout dates, flexible hours and specific ticket types on a property-by-property basis. We also needed a solution quickly and, most important of all, it needed to be affordable.

I first looked at hosted solutions, but those quickly proved cost prohibitive for this small nonprofit. I then found a free wordpress scheduling plugin used primarily by hair salons that I thought would give us 90% of the functionality we needed.

With the plugin I could break the day into "appointments" and set limits on the number of people allowed at each appointment. With some css, front end jQuery and a few hooks and filters to hide the "salon" vernacular and integrate with our payment system, we had our ticketing solution.

Contact

Christina Reeser

Morrisville, North Carolina
(919) 244 9381
christinareeser@gmail.com
www.iostudio.net

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Full Stack Web Developer

For 26 years, I've harnessed the power of HTML5, CSS, jQuery, PHP and other tools to help my clients put their best foot forward with robust, yet user-friendly websites and web applications. I don’t believe in programming in a bubble that excludes the client. It’s collaboration. It’s working with the client before design begins, when it's in the middle and/or once it's been developed but needs to be refreshed or improved upon.

  • Worked with a wide variety of businesses, organizations, artists, and advertising agencies to build robust and user-friendly websites and applications.
  • Experience in both front-end and back-end development
  • Currently focusing on WordPress developments, but have worked in multiple platforms, including Drupal, Joomla, Magento, and Shopify
  • Write or integrate plugins, modules, and frameworks to enhance site functionality based on client’s needs
  • Perform maintenance on client websites, including backups, updates, security enhancements and feature addition requests
  • Code ADA compliant websites for accessibility
  • Troubleshoot and debug issues related to site performance, functionality, and browser compatibility
  • Podcast creation, video and audio editing
  • PDF and Document Remediation for accessibility.

Skills

HTML5
PHP
JavaScript
jQuery
CSS
myPHP
SQL
BootStrap

Software

Wordpress
Photoshop
InDesign
VS Code
XD
Sketch
GitHub