Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

About Me

The defin­ing thing about my life is my Chris­t­ian faith. It shapes all that I do from fam­ily to design to choice of career.

I started this blog to share help­ful resources, soft­ware, and other Web sites that I have ben­e­fited from in my per­sonal and pro­fes­sional life. I also cre­ated the site to be a “sand­box” so that I could play around with dif­fer­ent design and devel­op­ment ideas.

The rest of this page focuses on my role of a Web pro­fes­sional. If you would like a more per­sonal per­spec­tive, you can BridgforthFamily.com.

I am a Web designer pas­sion­ate about user experience

User expe­ri­ence has always been very impor­tant to me because I was a Web user before I was a Web designer. I cre­ate inter­faces that are not only beau­ti­ful aes­thet­i­cally, but also work beau­ti­fully so that the Web user can accom­plish his or her task and get on to liv­ing their life.

I am a Web strategist

A project can never be just about a Web site. Whether it is using Twit­ter, Face­book, other social media, or going mobile, the client needs a cus­tomized Web strat­egy that will lever­age the numer­ous ways that their con­tent can be accessed beyond their Web site.

For the past 10 years, I have given lead­er­ship to the Web strat­egy for the U.S. Cam­pus Min­istry of Cam­pus Cru­sade for Christ which serves over 800 cam­puses, with a desire to expand to more. I con­sis­tently chal­lenge those I work with to think beyond just build­ing a Web site to devel­op­ing a Web strat­egy that meets their min­istry objectives.

I am a CSS and HTML expert

I am an expert CSS coder who pushes CSS to its lim­its in all my projects. I have been incor­po­rat­ing CSS3 in recent projects to enhance the user expe­ri­ence in the browsers that sup­port it. I am also very well-versed in HTML and pre­fer to hand code. I have advanced knowl­edge of Pho­to­shop and Fire­works. Illus­tra­tor is becom­ing one of my favorite tools. I have pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence with PHP and MySQL and have been devel­op­ing those skills of late in WordPress.

I value pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment and I am cat­a­lyst for resource release

I have an unquench­able thirst for learn­ing. I have a pas­sion for the Web and love to keep up on the lat­est trends and tech­niques. I have taken advan­tage of con­fer­ences like User Inter­face 10 and 12, Refresh ’06, Pho­to­shop World, and Front End Design Con­fer­ence to improve my skills and learn from the industry’s best.

Not only do I love to learn, but I also love to pass it along. Whether it is men­tion­ing a book or blog post to a col­league, shar­ing a link on Twit­ter, or writ­ing a post on this blog or my cre­ative team’s blog, I love to empower oth­ers with the knowl­edge I have gained. One of my dreams is to give back to the Web design com­mu­nity by shar­ing what I have learned.

I spe­cial­ize in clean, elegant interfaces

Don­ald Nor­man has said that “attrac­tive things work bet­ter.” Beau­ti­ful design improves com­mu­ni­ca­tion through visual orga­ni­za­tion and an attrac­tive aes­thetic. A brand’s suc­cess is all about its per­cep­tion. I believe a clean and ele­gant inter­face increases the value of a brand by help­ing com­mu­ni­cate func­tion, increase usabil­ity, cre­ate an attrac­tive per­son­al­ity, and build trust with between the brand and the end user.

I uti­lize my solid under­stand­ing of design and typog­ra­phy prin­ci­ples to cre­ate clean and ele­gant inter­faces with a clear visual hier­ar­chy, plenty of breath­ing space, and a com­fort­able aes­thetic that leads to ease of use and a pleas­ant experience.

Every Hero has a Back Story

I have always had an inter­est in com­put­ers. I remem­ber tak­ing sum­mer classes in com­put­ers and a basic pro­gram­ming class my senior year of high school. But that was before the age of per­sonal com­put­ers and the Internet.

I started tin­ker­ing with Web design in 1997. I learned basic HTML from a work­shop I found in the Com­puserve com­mu­nity. The foun­da­tion of my knowl­edge started with a book called Cre­at­ing Cool HTML Web­sites. I am ashamed to admit that the first site I designed was in frames (ahh). That site was a pre­cur­sor to our cur­rent min­istry site (bridgforthfamily.com).

After spend­ing 5 years work­ing on a col­lege cam­pus , we moved to Orlando to work at the World Head­quar­ters of Cam­pus Cru­sade for Christ. Dur­ing my first year in Orlando, I learned things about my gift­ing that gave me the con­fi­dence to pur­sue doing Web design and devel­op­ment with Cam­pus Crusade.

After get­ting my feet wet with my first pro­fes­sional web­site, I started work­ing on God­Squad. It was a great oppor­tu­nity for me. I was able to use my min­istry expe­ri­ence as a foun­da­tion for cre­ative work on the Internet.

God­Squad is a site that resources stu­dents and vol­un­teers that are launch­ing and/or lead­ing new Cam­pus Cru­sade min­istries. God­Squad is a life­line for these lead­ers because there are no Cam­pus Cru­sade staff on their cam­pus. They con­nect with a staff coach through phone calls and occa­sional cam­pus vis­its. God­Squad is a way to resource them 24/7 with Cam­pus Crusade’s proven resources.

Since start­ing to work with the Web, I have had many oppor­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate and develop web­sites that help to ful­fill var­i­ous aspects of the mis­sion of the Cam­pus Min­istry. I have enjoyed serv­ing stu­dents, vol­un­teers and Cam­pus Cru­sade staff mem­bers and mak­ing them more suc­cess­ful in their work through the work that I do design­ing, build­ing and main­tain­ing Web sites.

My Pro­fes­sional Skills

I hand coded the HTML on the first sites I worked with. Front­Page was the first WYSIWYG edi­tor that I used. I quickly aban­doned Front­Page for Macro­me­dia Dreamweaver 3. Com­bined with Fire­works, I now had some pow­er­ful tools to real­ize my design ideas and con­cepts. I became a huge fan of Dreamweaver and used it on a daily basis until 2007. I went back to hand cod­ing and pri­mar­ily use Coda and Text­mate.

I have been work­ing with CSS for page lay­out since 2003. The first year was mainly learn­ing through tuto­ri­als from Macro­me­dia and trial and error. I also spent time away work­ing on fund rais­ing for my min­istry role with Cam­pus Cru­sade for Christ.

In May of 2005, I was very excited to imple­ment my first site using CSS and XHTML for lay­out.  I would con­sider my CSS knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence as advanced.

In 2007, I read Andy Clarke’s Tran­scend­ing CSS. This book has had a huge influ­ence on my prac­tice. I am writ­ing more seman­tic code and using as much of CSS 2.1 as a I can.