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Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art, housed within one of the most respected research universities in the United States, offers an unparalleled convergence of contemporary art, technology, and critical discourse. My role in this project involved designing/coding a website to showcase the schools many news and events, both to strengthen the community while promoting the school to new students. The previous site used an old proprietary CMS that was no longer being updated. I worked closely with Charlie White, the head of the school, in advising the best way forward to have a site that could be easily managed by the staff.

I coded the site in two stages. I first took over the job after the project fell behind schedule, leaving me only a month before the release date. I found the site buttressed by Visual Composer, a flimsy page building plugin for WordPress. I did not like Visual Composer because it posed many security risks and rewired much of native WordPress functionality that made upgrading an issue. But to ensure the original release date, I used the existing code and framework for version I, with the intension to rewrite the backend later. Over the next few months, I rewrote the entire theme from scratch, making sure that the website ran efficiently and as automated as possible. Version II was released six months later with an entirely new WordPress backend that I am proud to have created.