My first paying gig was a re-design for a local speed shop, Stiegemeier Porting. I started this while in school and still maintain the site remotely. The beauty of this job is that I've been able to do a lot of photography and graphics, even a quick Flash intro page. By the time I left St Charles I had also re-designed their network, set up disaster recovery plans, and created some nice advertising media. All in all, it's been a great learning experience and everyone's been very pleased.
Dunn's Boats in upstate New York is a family owned marina service whose website in 2007 needed some work (in my opinion). A project in my Adobe Dreamweaver class was to find a site that (maybe) needed a makeover, and provide said makeover. The original site is no longer available to compare but their current homepage is fairly similar. My rendition won 2nd place overall in the Student Multimedia Design Exhibit for 2007 out of more than 100 entries. My instructors said I needed to package the whole thing up and try to sell it to the Dunn family. I never did and I've always wondered whether I should have. Maybe I still could...
Here are two websites I created while in school. The Ship-Shape design (below) was based on my yacht service business in Florida and is the first website I ever created. It was done entirely in hand-coded HTML with some inline styles and was used as the final exam in my HTML class. The Max-Tech project (left) was a dummy corporation and site created as a final project for an English Technical Writing class. I'm happy to report they both received A+ grades and kept my GPA in the Dean's List group!
Both of these were designed based on table layouts which is pretty much old-school and undesirable in the real world. In fact, I'm finding out that much of what I learned in college was outdated before I even graduated. Since then I have kept busy teaching myself CSS-based tableless layouts.
My first project using strictly CSS for layout and design! My wife, Lisa, works with her brother and sister-in-law at their family-owned business, Cabana Tans and Skincare. When it came time to update the "look and feel" of their website I wanted the chance to practice what I'd been learning and also photograph some young ladies in bikinis! This is still a work in progress but we hope to have it "live" sometime in June. The neatest thing on this site is the way the menu banner is designed on a curve and CSS is used to swap pieces of a hidden image in and out of a "window" for the rollover link functions. There is extensive use of remote rollovers and popups throughout the site using CSS and JavaScript. There has been a lot of trial and error creating this but, hey, it's all self-taught so I'm impressed! 
Here's another one, based mostly on CSS and done as a spec re-design for the Red Rooster Gallery, a local art and gift shop. It's not evident here but several pages of this site are laid out with tables to hold images of artwork available for purchase in the gallery. This is the first of two versions being worked and the "brushes" menu uses the same swap in-out method as the Cabana Tans site. The second version will have the more familiar CSS flyout text menu and image banner across the upper section of the page.I would love to read your comments on any or all of these.
