Web

I work at NBC affiliate station WCYB as the New Media Manager, where my duties include maintaining our website, acting as an intermediary between our staff and the company who hosts the website and training the newsroom staff on how to use the site. I also help our sales team come up with ways to sell sponsorships for online content as well as brainstorm with reporters on how to use web features to accompany their stories.

Although the website was built by a third-party company, I was aided by two other employees in populating all of our local content and rearranging things to suit our needs. I share ideas with the web managers at our sister stations to keep our site filled with fresh and interesting content that's unique to the website, allowing for cross-promotion in newscasts.

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The left-hand screenshot is what the site looked like when I started, and the right site is the completely redesigned site that launched about three months later. The notable thing about the new site is how much more emphasis news gets, not to mention it's much simpler to navigate. Click here to see my handiwork at wcyb.com.

The online version of the Greeneville Sun was based on a CMS that was developed and hosted in-house, which gave me lots of freedom to learn and experiment with coding. I was able to build new widgets and features for the site in PHP and upload them directly to the server in the building next door using the SSH terminal on my MacBook. This work helped to vastly improve my knowledge of server-side scripting and MySQL databases as well as how Linux servers are organized.

Project 1: Page Footer

While we never got to move ahead with a full redesign before I left, we started redesigning parts of the website a little bit at a time in order to lighten the load. One of the things I started with was the footer of the page. Originally all it held was a banner ad and copyright info; I added a sitemap and contact information to make the page a little easier to navigate. The icons next to the logo have a pop-up tooltip effect that was created using jQuery. Click here and scroll down to view the footer.

Project 2: Contact Us

The "Contact Us" page was the second part of the redesign. On the left side of the image is the original Contact Us page, which was just a large block of text with the names and numbers buried inside. What I did was lay out the entire staff in a table. Mousing over a name highlights that row to make it more readable; that effect was created using jQuery. Click here to view the Contact Us table.

Project 3: Bridal Guide

Originally the only online mention of submitting wedding and engagement forms for publication in the paper was included in the old contact page. There was a phone number, an email for the Living editor and links to download PDF copies of the forms, but that was all. I built the and designed the new section from scratch using PHP, HTML and CSS. It included online forms for engagements and weddings as well as a block for wedding services who advertised in the paper. The whole thing was completely written by hand except for a little help I got from our developer getting the picture attachments to work correctly. Click here to view the Bridal Guide section.

Project 4: Retro Photos

My background and interest in film photography often led to me finding excuses to dig around in the old negative archives in the newspaper office. One day after I discovered our photo department had a negative scanner, I decided to see how it would work with the negatives we had on hand. Once I saw the amazing quality I knew we had to start offering these online. Every Friday I would pick out one photo from each decade in the archive, scan them and meticulously clean them up before uploading them to a gallery on the website we called "Retro Photos." Our viewers gave us great feedback about this unique feature that offered visitors young and old a chance to see what Greeneville photographers were capturing in the 1950's and beyond. Click here to view the Retro Photos gallery.

Project 5: People's Choice

The Sun has a yearly poll called the People's Choice where residents of the county vote for their favorite people and businesses. The winners are then displayed in a special section of the newspaper. The left side shows how they were originally displayed online, which was a scanned version of the section displayed on pages selected by a drop-down. We got several complaints about the image quality and difficulty of navigating the section so I built the brand-new version seen on the right. Each ad is displayed by itself in much higher quality and everything is grouped by category. Click here to view the People's Choice section.

Project 6: Election Central

Originally, the online coverage the Sun offered of local elections was a scanned table of polling results. I built a site from scratch using the unique Concrete5 CMS to offer much more local content, including descriptions of each office, questionnaires and statements from any candidate who submitted them and news stories relating to the election. Click here to visit Election Central.

Girls Inc. of Bristol	Dr. A.K. Sen	USS Greeneville	Mohawk Marketing

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