Beryl's Portfolio

Projects

Resume - 20 years of experience as a technical writer in the computer industry. Users' guides, installation guides, software development kits, technical notices, end-user help, policy and procedure documents, system requirements, user interface design, and usability testing. Print and online.

Project management - 10 years of experience in staffing and running a non-profit community event. From creating a logo and corporate identity, to handling fund raising and budgeting, to creating and maintaining the web site. I have even hand delivered street closure notices to local business owners.

HogBytes - This entire website has been my personal creative outlet for more than 10 years. With a digital camera, some good software, and a knowledge of hand-coding HTML, I have posted stories and photos to share with the world. I'm not the best photographer, or the best writer. I'm just trying to capture small pieces of life as it happens, with a wild hope that someone else will be able to connect with something they find here. Be sure to check out the Other Stories category - there is more to life than motorcycles and cars.

Design Concepts

In general, my design philosophy is to keep the message accessible to as many people as possible. My site has no streaming videos, no audio files, and no animation or Flash. I try to keep the image sizes small enough to limit bandwidth problems for most browsers and connections. I have used javascript sparingly. I have left older stories and files intact rather than updating constantly to meet the latest standards or fads. I still believe that a web page should be usable by any browser, but I have not yet figured out how to send my photos through text readers such as JAWS.

Credits

I do not have any connection with the companies listed below. I just want to give credit where it is due. The links below will take you away from this site.

I would like to thank JASC for creating Paint Shop Pro and keeping it a reasonably priced graphics tool. I've been using it since version 4, even though I have access to more expensive programs. This site also contains files that were generated with JASC Media Center and JASC Photo Album and later hand-customized. These are great tools. Corel has purchased JASC and the products are still available.
I have also used Macromedia Dreamweaver and Homesite over the years, along with other HTML tools that have long ago been abandoned by their creators. In 1996 I started out with a product called HTML Notepad to edit my HTML. It was about 2 steps ahead of Notepad - it had buttons for adding basic heading and paragraph tags and simple formatting tags like <b></b>.
My current digital camera is a digital Nikon. Thanks to Steve's Digicams for helping me select a camera. The product descriptions and reviews on his site are very helpful.