The Blue Stick, Independent Web & Political Consulting

portfolio

UC Taxis Custom web application for the Harvard Undergraduate Council, the Harvard College student government, to coordinate taxi sharing for students across the university. The site has over 800 users, both undergraduate and graduate students, 300 of which joined in the first week. The site features an extremely simple user interface, with taxis appearing on custom Google Maps. Access is restricted to Harvard University affiliates using the Facebook Connect login system. The Blue Stick defined the project, designed and implemented all aspects to the project, coordinated all pieces to launch, and assisted the UC in marketing the product across campus to ensure a successful product launch. Worked closely with the UC team pushing this project. Developed under a term-long contract putting The Blue Stick in charge of the UC's web initiatives.
Harvard Undergraduate Council Developed website for Harvard Undergraduate Council, the student government at Harvard College. Worked closely with the client to enable designs that featured rotating content they wanted to display prominently. Trained the client on both the technical parts to updating the site and how to best organize and deliver their message online. Built and customized themes and plug-ins for the Wordpress platform, which enabled Council-members to fully control all content on the site in a simple, completely non-technical manner.
Bowman\|Hysen for Undergraduate Council Website for a successful campaign for a president/vice-president ticket for the Harvard Undergraduate Council, a legislative body representing 6700 constituents. We worked closely with the campaign to ensure a consistent message conveyed through both the design and text of the site as well as the contents of the Twitter and Facebook pages for the campaign. Used the site to inform voters about the candidates' stance on campus issues, push for endorsements from student groups, organize supporters and the 100+ person campaign staff, and in the final days of the campaign, get out the vote. The site was built on Wordpress, a widely used free software platform adapted to allow for quick updating through an approval system centered around the campaign manager.
Raas Chaos 2009 Developed website for one of the nation's largest raas Indian dance competition organized by the South Asian Society at The George Washington University. Worked with the client to design the "urban" site theme and create an outline for the information targeted to various audiences including dance teams, fans, media, and sponsors. Uses Wordpress, which allowed the competitions directors to easily update content and provide information to the 1000+ audience members, dancers, and other attendees at moment's notice.
Harvard College in Asia Program A student organization at Harvard University needed a website to promote their cross-cultural conference exchange programs. The site serves not only their members at Harvard with password-protected information portals, but also provides information for potential donors/sponsors, international collaborators, alumni, and others involved in the organization's success. The site also uses Wordpress, giving the student organization's leaders a very user-friendly online interface to updated the website.
The Advocate Online The student newspaper at Albuquerque Academy, an independent middle and high school in New Mexico, wanted a website to put their content online. Through meticulous planning, design/development, policy-creation, and training, all primarily provided by us, the website has grown into a major operation at the newspaper with a dedicated editor and web staff. The key achievement for The Advocate Online has been the careful creation of policies, practices, and training materials to ensure that the website remains easy-to-use, visually appealing, and sustainable for future updates and initiatives by the editorial staff. These efforts have paid off for the paper as the website and online-content turn into larger focuses for the paper and its future. The website included industry standard technologies and followed intuitive design techniques. The site was designed with a key towards presenting many content-types (such as photos, text stories, audio podcasts, etc.) in an easy to use content-management structure. The website also features technologies such as RSS, rare at the time for high school newspaper websites, but that gave the site the tools used by professional papers.
Personal blog for Punit Shah While heavy on technological capabilities, capturing the blogger's background through a New Mexican/Western theme primarily drove the website's design considerations. Using photographs, graphics, and scanned objects, the blogging theme was designed with careful detail to balance creating an effective backdrop for the site while still emphasizing the importance of the blogger's content. Behind the design sits complex technologies to make life easier for both the blogger and readers. For example, an integrated Facebook Connect system creates a simple method to track comments using readers' existing accounts from the popular social media site. The site is built on the popular blogging platform Wordpress and includes, among other features, detailed web statistics collection tools and a stream of the blogger's recent Twitter posts.
Charger Aquatics A local swim club based at Albuquerque Academy needed a website to both sell their programs to potential members and provide information for current members. We worked closely with the client to identify their business needs and organize their content to meet the needs for both current and prospective members. As with all projects, the client's staff members were trained to update and maintain the website upon deliver of the website using Adobe Contribute. After the initial contract, we continued working with the client, adding new features such as advertising.
Supercomputing Challenge Final Report After a year-long research project in mathematics and high performance computing, a research team with the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge needed a website to present their report and findings. This website emphasized simplicity while integrating a visually engaging design that draws readers to the content. While the research was highly technical, the website easily integrated graphics, tables, and other visual aids to enhance readers' retention of the report content. Further, the site was built to be standards compliant and compatible across all browsers. Among other awards, the project won Best Final Report Website at the Supercomputing Challenge's award ceremony.
If I Could Change the World Project The client wanted a website to publicize a children's book project about their ideas to help the world and solicit new ideas from other kids. The site was designed with an emphasis on being approachable to children while providing information for members of the media and teachers interested in the project.