S2UDIO.COM

about

S2UDIO is a one-woman freelance project, focusing on web development/design and graphic design.

(Hi, I’m Jess!)

I’ve been doing graphic design and designing/building websites for fun since 1998 and I’ve never stopped.  I’ve even managed to turn this hobby into a full-time, professional career for nearly two decades.  I try to leave my funky style on everything I work on, and although I use modern practices and designs, I don’t just follow “web trends“.  Your content and call to actions are the most important part of your website, not over-saturating it with large images, forgettable animations or cluttered/disorganized content.

Visually overdone layouts command and shift audience focus, which is good for call to actions but it could overwhelm viewers from getting to other areas of the website.  The most important thing is keeping balance on people’s attention on what’s important – your message/brand, updates and being visually appealing .  I want you to have your objective shine through, and not get lost in the big sea of look-alike, themed sites.

I am strictly a hand-coder.  Your website will be built from the ground up, so that if something breaks, I know exactly how to fix it and so that your site loads quickly.  There will not be a need for a ton of plugins, no point and click site builders that bloat your website (and also slow it down) and no complicated purchased theme(s).

I also always keep in mind that my clients should have a stable, well-crafted product that I can adjust easily, and potentially any other web developer can jump into and work in, without a headache (should my clients choose to take their services elsewhere) while adhering to web accessibility standards and good UX structure.

Please feel free to contact me with freelance front-end or content management opportunities.

 

skills & SOFTWARE

the Fundamentals

HTML, CSS/Sass, PHP, jQuery

WordPress, web design, website development, UX design, responsive design, Command line/Terminal, LAMP development, database management, editing javascript, Photoshop (web and print), Pods CMS, WordPress as a CMS, PSD to WordPress conversions, Git/GitHub, SVN, Jira, Trello, Slack, WordPress VIP, VIP-CLI, tumblr templates, PDFs, refactoring code, implementing SEO best practices, UX best practices, meeting web accessibility standards, creating landing pages and crafting call-to-actions, MailChimp, Braze, Formstack, training CMS users, creating and maintaining detailed documentation for both marketers and fellow developers while also being a frequent liaison to non-technical co-workers, marketing teams and other teams.

 

Work Experience

Currently

Hachette Book Group

FEBRUARY 2019 – PRESENT (Full-time)
Senior Front-end Developer/Designer (Web Services Team – Support, UX Team)

Previously held titles at HBG: Web Content Producer, Front-end Developer

Duties

CMS duties: Maintaining several HBG property websites and verticals (the main website, internal websites, community websites and domain/child themes), maintaining imprint content, onboarding and training marketers and new team members to use our highly customized CMS, creating author/title specific landing pages on the fly, maintaining HBG content/pages and tours, setting up domains/imprints, utilizing Gutenberg, helping marketers with CMS overrides when necessary.

Code/Development: Creating author sites, creating HBG property websites and verticals (the main website, internal websites, community websites and domain/child themes), refactoring legacy code, making structural changes to existing templates for the product and central marketing teams (ie: title pages), maintaining the code repository (reviewing and approving code pull requests for my team), QA/UAT work, troubleshooting broken areas of website/code, ecomm related changes, ensuring we’re following web accessibility standards, setting up imprints (for the ONIX importer, branding).

UX work: Creating mock-ups of internal company websites and tools, existing and new websites, auditing our web pages for any bad UX practices, enforcing UX/web accessibility standards within our website(s), motivating and empowering our marketing teams with innovative and carefully crafted Gutenberg patterns and custom blocks (in conjunction with the Web Services team).

Other: Creating and maintaining CMS documentation for both marketing teams and for my team/other developers, editing author and title information as necessary (within the CMS and Title Management), graphic design, auditing our web pages for broken or incorrect URLs assigned by marketing employees, maintaining several imprints, manually importing ONIX eBook reports on a daily basis, troubleshooting broken ONIX reports/cron jobs, utilizing VIP-CLI commands to run reports, troubleshooting within Title Management and Aprimo, working on “business as usual” technical support tickets on a daily basis (mainly for marketing teams, sometimes other teams).

Imprint Duties

I am assigned multiple Imprints to maintain at HBG.  These duties includes updating and maintaining their content, being the technical liaison for marketing teams for troubleshooting issues, fixing broken links, fixing issues on title/product pages, fixing issues on contributor pages and also offering advice on UX for landing pages.

 

Skills and software

WordPress CMS, WordPress VIP, VIP-CLI, GitHub, JIRA, Cherwell, Confluence, ONIX, Title Management, Aprimo, Firebrand, Formstack (building forms, exporting submissions), Riddle, Braze, Docker, Photoshop/CS, Gutenberg, Terminal, npm, stylelint, phpcs, Sass, Figma, Sketch

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previously

personal interests

In my spare time, I enjoy:

• creating phone/watch wallpapers
• i’m a huge fan of the new york rangers and the new york mets
• traveling
• cycling
• nature walks/hiking
• designing weird/rad jewelry