Web Development Consulting and Contracting Services

I’m an independent Web developer located in San Diego, though I work with clients all over the US, including Washington DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.

I specialize in helping nonprofit and for-profit organizations build outstanding Web sites and applications powered by open source technologies.

I take pride in delivering on time and within budget -- skills that come from years of experience managing large Web development projects.

Why "ReturnControl"?

Too many organizations have lost control of their Web sites.

Updating the content often means filing a request with IT and hoping someone gets to it in a couple weeks. Updating the design means tediously modifying each and every page on the site. And integrating with third-party services like Salesforce means making expensive modifications to proprietary, undocumented code.

It doesn't have to be that way.

I build sites that let organizations regain control of their Web presences. When you hire me, I work with your team to design and develop a site that helps you achieve a goal -- whether it's to increase donations, generate more leads, bring together more people, or get your message out to the world.

Because each site comes with an easy-to-use online administration panel, you and key members of your team can publish or update content at any time. Because your content is stored in a database, keeping your design fresh means updating a template or stylesheet rather than editing hundreds of documents. And since your site is built with the open-source Drupal content management system, you have access to all of the code, security updates, and a thriving community of developers who understand how your site was built.

Why Drupal

Drupal is often called a content management system, but it's best to think of it as a toolkit for building all sorts of Web sites, whether they are content-focused, community-focused, or commerce-focused.

Drupal is used by the US government's Whitehouse.gov, by the ACLU, the Economist, the Onion, Tesla, UC Berkeley, and thousands of other nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

The Drupal software is available for free, the product of contributions from developers all over the world. Because you're not paying licensing fees, you can focus your money on customizing your Web site.

Drupal has an excellent security record. A core security team regularly releases software updates for both Drupal core and its contributed modules. And Drupal's internal permissions system allows you to create different levels of access, controlling exactly who can and can't access your information.

Background

25 years of professional experience building and managing Web sites
Independent Drupal developer since 2007
Dozens of Web sites successfully launched and managed for clients
Experience building large content-focused sites with thousands of articles; community-focused sites with thousands of users; database-driven sites that provide complex search tools for large data sets; and more.
Computer Science degree from the University of California at San Diego
Writing degree from the University of California at San Diego
Insured

Services

Discovery -- helping your organization understand its main Web-related goals and problems, and exploring the tools and features that will solve them.
User Experience & Information Architecture -- organizing your site so that your customers or internal teams can do what they need to do.
Content Strategy -- reviewing your existing content and creating a plan for what needs to be updated; who will be responsible for the updates; how often new content will go online; what style of writing your users will be most responsive to; and how users (and search engines) will find that content.
Web Development (Front-end & Back-end) -- configuring Drupal and writing custom code to make your Web site look and function exactly the way it was designed to.
Training -- in-person or Web-based training that teaches your internal team how to manage content on the site and your technical team how to maintain Drupal and keep it secure. Custom "fast track" training also available for development teams that are new to Drupal.

Contact