About
I have over 5 years of experience as a professional web developer. My expertise is in front-end development, using HTML5, CSS3, and the jQuery framework for JavaScript to create innovative and useful visual designs. I also have a solid knowledge of AJAX for dynamic page loading, mySQL and PHP for database programming, and the WordPress and Drupal content management systems.
As much as I enjoy pushing myself to come up with unique designs and concepts with each website I produce, I always make sure that my projects:
- Work across all operating systems and browsers, including older versions of Internal Explorer
- Are built in a responsive design that will adjust to the sizes of all smaller mobile devices
- Are minimized in loading times through use of plugins such as YSlow and JSLint
- Function correctly if JavaScript is not enabled
Please take a look at my portfolio below, and never hesitate to ask me any questions at cmeszler@gmail.com
Latest Projects
Lutheran World Relief is a non-profit charitable organization that works with partners overseas to create long-lasting solutions to poverty. I act as the sole web developer to maintain their current website through the requests from over 100 employees and design supplemental pages as requested.
- Taught myself how to use Sphere, a content management system designed specifically to non-profit charities, and reprogrammed it to run as efficiently as possible. The default CSS and JavaScript files were reduced by thousands of lines of code and the site ultimately loaded 150% times faster. I also rebuilt the site with a fully responsive design, even though there are pages such as this form that force the use of a template with incredibly dated web standards.
- Created many interactive online tools and reports, sometimes from PSD mock-ups, including: All of them are responsive except the Annual Report from 2012.
- Built out several interactive features with CSS and JavaScript/jQuery, including the rollover map on lwr.org, the double-underlined rollover links all across programs.lwr.org, and the animated slideshows on both homepages.
Little Flowers is an improvisational electronic music group that plays energetic live shows. I am also the drummer of the band.
- Has a background of randomly animating colored boxes to inspire interaction with the site.
- Simple, responsive one-page design with the capability to overlay videos on the screen.
- Created a jarring, scrolling "music video" with my web design skills at http://littleflowers.biz/fakeeyes.
Rebecca Anne Rogers Meszler is a visual artist, working in watercolors, embroidery and many other media to create whimsical art inspired by antiques and children's books. (She is also my wife).
- Designed a very minimal responsive site that still has a few jQuery flourishes, like falling confetti on a few pages.
- Includes an e-mail form written in PHP for commissions.
Jonathan Pfeffer is a musician and composer from Philadelphia, PA.
- Designed responsive WordPress template to very specific requests for full-page background images and menu alignment.
Older Projects
LP33.tv was a start-up music website conceived by former top executives of EMI Records and MTV Europe, with the idea of being a new, modern portal for music discovery and publicity. Due to circumstances outside of my control, the company or site no longer exist.
- As one of the first and last employees over it's 3 year life-span, I got an inside look at a start-up and all of its successes and failures.
- My primary task was developing and maintaing a hip YouTube-style media player using the FLEX framework, which is a skill I was able to teach myself quickly on the job. It was the centerpiece of the website, which was a highlight in scoring great contracts to act as the record label for McDonald's Restaurants, to be a sponsor for the South by Southwest festival, and to become one of the first legal gateways of Western music into China.
- I worked within a team of developers to interface the media player with the rest of the site through a system that included PHP, JavaScript and Drupal. A version control technology called TortoiseSVN was used in this process.
Olivia Robinson is an accomplished artist from Baltimore, MD, who uses performance and electronic forms of media to create works with a strong sense of political activism.
- The site was built to be a one-page design template within the Drupal content management system, including all kinds of nested sub-pages with artworks and image slideshows.
- While it looks good and works on most browsers, I would certainly approach this site differently now, including image minimization, AJAX dynamic page loads and a better use of MVC design concepts.
Meszlermedia V2.0 was my previous portfolio site, which is now obsolete based on current coding standards, but the animations I designed consistently impressed a lot of people.
Experiments
The Open Blog is mostly an example site to show that I understand the basic concepts behind PHP, mySQL, AJAX and JSON, which are all skills I haven't had much opportunity to use extensively as a front-end developer. Open Blog connects with a database to allow anyone to add, delete and search through posts, all loaded dynamically on the same page. My PHP is split into several files, of which the code can be seen here. (Note: I know there are several security risks in this project, but it's only intended to be an example of my code. Please play with it as much as you'd like).
This drawing application is something I built a long time ago, but it's actually done in straight JavaScript without a framework, so it's useful to show that I am not dependent on jQuery in scripting websites. You can pick a color from the palette at the bottom of the screen and toggle the drawing mode on and off by clicking anywhere in the black area above.