Rachel Popowcer Website
This portfolio site made for Albuquerque professional artist and art teacher Rachel Popowcer, was a bit of a change of pace for me. Usually I work on projects that are heavier on the programming end, but this was more about figuring out the optimal product to meet my client's needs and then setting it up for her. I worked with Rachel over many hours to figure out the best way to showcase her artwork, and simplify the blog post procedure to keep her followers and students up-to-date on her recent art and upcoming workshops.
Rachel had a Joomla website created a couple of years ago that, design-wise, was perfectly serviceable. The problem was that it was simply too hard for her to update and maintain without the help of the original developer. At the suggestion of mutual friend, I looked into using Squarespace. I had a poor opinion of website builders previously because I had seen some of the awful, buggy, insecure nonsense to come out of Wix. However, I was very pleasantly surprised by Squarespace. The themes were beautiful, elegant, and easy to customize (as long as you didn't need to do anything too fancy). The monthly fee takes care of all security, updating, private domain, and everything else, so now she only has to worry about one bill. A particular highlight for Rachel was she wanted to be able to add photos and blog posts with her phone the way she does on Instagram, and most CMSs don't allow for that.
As I write this, it sure seems like a commercial for Squarespace, but I guess that's okay. You might think that a website builder would be bad for me professionally, but I've not found that to be the case because I prefer to do custom application development. For clients like Rachel who need an all-in-one solution that can be updated on the fly, Squarespace made both of our lives easy and I would certainly recommend it to people with similar needs. It was a fun platform to use for a fun project.