Web Design Portfolio of Jason Simanek
Grand Ole Opry
I was very fortunate to be the Website Manager for the Grand Ole Opry when the time came to have a new website built.
I worked for a year or more with our internal creative department head and an outside design and development company to ensure the finished website’s design and functionality fulfilled the project’s requirements.
Nash Country Daily
After Country Weekly magazine folded, a subset of the staff was kept on to create a new country music news website, Nash Country Daily. I worked with an existing WordPress theme to create a unique website design for the new venture.
The Heads-Up Grid
I created this in-browser development tool because I often design sites in HTML + CSS, but I wanted a way to overlay a grid on the page as I refined the code.
Visit “The Heads-Up Grid” page
Read my blog post “Introducing the Heads-Up Grid”
One of my proudest moments was when Jeffrey Zeldman found something I made interesting enough to mention on Twitter!
Gramps Website
Gramps is a free software project and community that produces a genealogy program that is both intuitive for hobbyists and feature-complete for professional genealogists. I helped them create a new website to improve upon their existing Wikimedia-based website.
Dancers Cup Tour 2015 Dance Camp
The Dancers Cup Tour is an organization of several ballroom dance competition owners. This is the first year that they are putting on this dance camp. I adapted and refined an existing “disco ball” design that they had used on earlier printed materials. For the website I created a mobile-first responisve design that presents the event details in an attractive and elegant fashion.
Country Weekly Website
Though I did not create this site design, I have spent the last few years steadily improving it via CSS as well as clearly written update requests with design mockups submitted to the web development team that existed at the time.
Dance World of Nashville
A prominent ballroom in Nashville wanted to update its site. I focused on making it appealing to new customers and answering all of their questions in concise and easy-to-find style.
Run To Rescue
My brother Dean was involved with organizing this fundraiser for the Prague, Neb., Rescue Squad. I donate my work every year and use the project as an opportunity to experiment with column-based layouts and some newer CSS features while keeping their target audience in mind.
Juanita Simanekova
I redesigned Juanita’s website in 2012. The site was designed to be classy and striking.
James Bockelman
Mr. Bockelman teaches a variety of fine art classes at Concordia University in Seward, Neb. and is also a professional painter. Together we designed an elegant online showcase for his work.
SweeTess
SweeTess is a small Georgia-based company that sells stevia-based sweetener products. I designed and illustrated the site and created the site markup as a WordPress theme.
AccuCut Website & E-mails
My work at AccuCut was split between the design of printed assets and the design and management of website assets and newsletters. In collaboration with my Creative Director and the Marketing Director, I made some broad improvements in file organization, site functionality and design within the existing site template.
HTML Character Chart
This HTML character chart tool is powered by PHP, JavaScript, XML and XSLT. This is an ongoing project in user interface design.
In hindsight, committing time to learning XSLT was not a smart choice for my career goals. However, it’s still cool to have an XML file storing my giant catalog of character data rather than all of it being strewn about in a complex HTML file.
Whether it’s XSLT or other forms of server-side scripting, the principals of writing efficient web templates are the same.