The personalized stole site might be one of the projects at Herff Jones that I am proudest of. It is also the project that rekindled my love for web development work. The personalized stole site, available here, is a series of sites that students from specific universities can access to customize and order stoles for their graduation, with basically whatever they want on it.

The site and concept itself is pretty straightforward. Go on, pick out what you want, and hit order. The actual work that went into it is why I am so proud of this project though. We had originally started with an outside vendor that worked on developing the initial build of the site, and after our contract with them ended, I took over as the main developer for this site and handled all of the plugin updates, new site setups, and other changes as needed.

This project served as an excellent way to de-rust my web development skills and even expand on some of them (looking at you, Javascript) to help get myself back into the web-mindset. This project prompted me to then complete the Codecademy full-stack dev course, and dive back into the field as a whole. The work that our outside vendor, Ayokay did, was stellar, and it was great to be able to reteach myself and expand upon the work from people who have more experience in the industry than I do. And, once updates and new features were needed, it was an excellent learning experience and challenge to figure out how to accomplish those needs. Overall, super fun project that I can say I am very proud of.

I did have a role in this outside of just taking over the web dev work, but not much design related. The rest of it was typical project manager type work.