The business owner wanted a site that would be easy to manage but with very specific design features that were hard to manipulate using the standard CMSs at the time. After investigating alternate solutions, we decided that the only way to render the site with his vision and to allow it to be managed personally, I would have to build a custom CMS. Using PHP and MySQL, I built a site that allowed the owner to update all content areas, add new sections to the site, add and delete pages and manage its photo galleries.

The business owner wanted to create a site that she could directly sell her products through the internet. She had been selling her products at trade shows and through third party sites, but she wanted direct access to her customers as well as control of the aesthetic surrounding her brand. We used her existing marketing material to develop the elements of her design. We wanted to make it easy for her customers to browse the site with specific items in mind as well as let her highlight items she wanted to persuade her customers to buy. We set the site up using a rudimentary e-commerce platform on her existing server and helped work through getting her banking attached to the account.

The operator approached me about developing a website for the performing arts center that would highlight the professional, active and diverse entertainment they were hosting at the center. The center was primarily built to serve the needs of the local school system in the eastern part of the county but they were moving towards hosting more professional, touring entertainment and community theatre. He wanted the site to have a events calendar that could be filtered by school and non-school events. The calendar would need to have an administrative interface that would allow the theater to style posts and add images. The site also featured technical specs and a theater "walk-through" to provide information for visiting artists and people wanting to rent the facility. We also designed print material for the theater for the season catalog.

The business was a long time collaborator with our company and was looking to update their website. They were looking to create a site that was more gallery/portfolio driven. We decided to build the site, primarily in Flash, to take advantage of the animation, transition, and loading features that the technology provided. We used their existing design elements but leaned into a more contrasting and saturated color palette. Because of the deficiencies of Flash, we had to work hard to make the site crawlable by search engines.

This was one of my favorite designs to work on when I was employed at Rover Technology Fusions. We were doing a redesign of an existing site where the client had more room for content and would feature press and related news on their site. One of the little flourishes that I added to the site was to take their hero image that was on the home page of their site and, using Flash animate the picture of Tampa Bay and the skyway bridge, adding moving water and commuting cars.

Here's the link on the Way Back machine to enjoy the animated hero pic:
EMS Corporation Site 2006

Opera Tower was one of many sites that I worked on for our client Florida East Coast Realty (FECR), one of the largest real estate developers in Miami. Florida East Coast Realty specializes in high end condominium projects and Opera Tower was one of their signature properties. The purpose of the FECR sites was to emphasize the trendy, exciting nature of the condominiums and sell the lifestyle of the Brickell Bay experience to potential buyers. The designs were created from still mock up provided by FECR and we would then build multimedia, animated flash based sites based on the given content.

As with all of our other FECR sites at the time, Opera Tower was entirely rendered in Flash and included a toggling sound track, wipe transitions and interactive mock ups of the living experience at the Tower.

I was hired by Jabil Circuit with two main responsibilities. One was to support the Global Marketing Manager in his efforts to create effective sales presentations, expertise recognition strategies, drive content through B2B and industry publications and support the sales staff in whatever they needed to take care of their potential and existing customers. My other primary duty was to manage their web presence.

The site, at the time was entire written for and managed by Red Dot CMS software. I was in charge of making whatever content changes needed to be made and to make sure information was timely and accurate to meet SEC standards as a publicly traded company.

In 2003, I was hired by HSN as part of a team of developers and designers to help quickly and smoothly transition web site designs for HSN.com. My primary job was use JavaScript, HTML and Photoshop to batch convert large amounts of product images and then render product description pages for each product.

Due to the nature of the company, timely process of the products was essential due to the timeliness of the sales and the turnover of the products.

In 2000 I was hired by Mid Atlantic Medical Services to serve as the web designer and web master for both their internet and intranet web sites. In my capacity in this position, I designed and rendered web layouts in HTML and JavaScript that the programmers could then add code. I also participated in meetings to support other departments at the insurance company to help develop strategies to implement web solutions for their processes.

I originally joined the Center for Defense Information to serve as a producer for their syndicated television show America's Defense Monitor. Almost as soon as I was hired, the head of the organization asked if I would be willing to take over the management of the web site instead. With no web development and very little programming background at that point in my life, I locked myself in my office and taught myself how to hand code HTML and some rudimentary JavaScript.

At that point, I became the manager of a 1000+ page informational website and military information database. Over time I was able to get the organization to provide me access to an early version of Photoshop and a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver.

I also served as the organization's desktop publisher, managing the layout of their weekly congressional newsletter and the design of their annual Military Almanac

When Rover Technology Fusions decided to take their internal web development team and begin to market their services more agressively outside of their current B2B relationships, we decided to create a Rover Designs site to match the branding and aesthetic of their other businesses. I was tasked to created a logo based on the exsisting Rover Logos that keyed in on our artistic and creative aproach to web development

After working for Rover Technology Fusions, remotely, for several years, first as a salaried employee and then as a contract employee, in 2014 I, along with my friend Todd Lewandoski, decided to form our own media company, specializing in web, graphic design and video. We settled on the name Tall Dog Media as an emalgamation of our two sets of initials -- his being TAL and mine being DWG. We decided the logo had to look modern but also relaxed and playful. The graphic to the right shows the evolution of the logo over time.

Right after graduating from the Academy of Design and Technology in Tampa, I decided to create a business entity I could work under for my part time event videography business and as an umbrella for any small freelance work I enaged in. The result was Groomes Designs. The logo was an abstract representation of the "G" from my last name, formulated with arcs and waves and utilizing the color scheme of my old high school.

One of my jobs as a designer at Rover Technology Fusions was to design and layout marketing materials for our various products that could be handed out at meetings with prospective clients and at trade shows. This brochure was for our electronic pen product, RoverInk. And, yes, that is me as a model on the cover of the trifold.

During my time at The Center For Defense Information, one of my primary tasks was to serve as the organizations desktop publisher. In this role, I was assigned the job of designing the layout and managing the content, provided by the analysts, for the annual CDI Military Almanac. Designed in PageMaker, it was published in both electronic form (pdf) and as a soft cover book.

Click here for a pdf version of the almanac.

One of the primary ways the Center For Defense Information to effectively have an affect as a military watchdog organization was by publishing a weekly newsletter that was sent to every legislator in Congress. My duty was to gather up stories and articles written by our analysts, organize them and lay them out in a single newsletter.

Click here for an example of an issue of the Weekly Defense Monitor