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About

ON THE SUBJECT OF ME

I am Brian Michel - the creator behind SOJO web. While I do a tremendous amount of web design work, it is not my main job. My main job is serving as the Operations Manager and Program Director of a cluster of radio stations for Millcreek Broadcasting in Salt Lake City, Utah. In other words, I oversee the formats (what gets played) and what happens on the air. Our stations include Hip Hop station KUUU (U92), Top 40 station KUDD (Mix 107.9), Classic Rock station KYLZ (Utah's 104.7) and Active Rock station KZZQ (97.5 The Blaze).

While being a radio professional for 17 years, I picked up some other skills along the way - namely, in the area of web design writing dynamic applications and more. It started out of need several years back when the web started taking fire. I worked at a small radio company in Fort Wayne, Indiana that didn't have the busgets necessary to put together a real set of working website... so, that was my in. On top of that, being the kind of person who has to know how everything works behind the scenes, that sparked the fire of what would become SOJO web.

Personally speaking, I am a father of two boys and live in South Jordan, Utah (in the Salt Lake Valley). For those of you keeping score, South Jordan is where the name "SOJO" came from. I love sports - namely ice hockey and snowboarding.

My credentials in web design all come mostly in the form of self-taught hard work. I have read every single book on the subjects of PHP, ColdFusion, CSS, and many other web topics. OK, that was an exaggeration, but I really do have a library of hundreds of books on a range of subjects from web design software to complex object oriented web programming practices. I have also taken a few certification classes at the University of Utah for subjects such as Adobe's Flash program.

ABOUT THIS SITE

The site is an ever-growing work in progress - just like the world wide web. I wanted to create something where I could not only showcase my talents, but also write about whatever comes to mind in the blog and display some photos. Who knows where this site will go next. The site was intended not just to help me acquire new clients but also be a part of the web design community and help fellow designers out. That's one great about the developer community; members typically really help each other out. It pushes all of us to constantly evolve and provide the highest quality work.

I had two rules when I developed this site. The first one is that it had to be simple, elegant, and easy to navigate while having some eye appeal. The second was that it had to be standards compliant all the way around. So, I have made sure that my code lives up to standards and can be seen correctly on any standards based web browser. Please note that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) is far from what any developer would describe as standards based, but I have still taken steps to hopefully ensure compatibility with IE6, as well.

I have tried to use fonts that are available on all machines - whether Mac or PC. The fonts include Geneva, Georgia, Lucida Grande, Lucida Console, and Monaco. In theory, those fonts should be on all modern machines. But if you don't happen to have any one of those fonts on your computer and have trouble viewing this site the way it was meant to be viewed, please accept my sincere apology.

The site's layout and design was completely hand coded using Panic's web application authoring tool Coda. The dynamic applications on the site were created with a variety of methods. Primarily, to speed up coding, extensions from WebAssist were used in Dreamweaver CS4. Once the initial code was in place, I would tweak it and edit by hand using the aforementioned Coda from Panic. Unlike many sites that use WordPress or Expression Engine to power their blogs and photostream applications, this site does not use any of those services. The blog and photo applications were customly created by me, exclusively for this site.

The graphics for and layout comps were created using Adobe's two graphics workhorses - Fireworks CS4 and PhotoShop CS4. The primary layout and background graphics were created mostly in Fireworks because of its superior quality in handling web and screen iimages with it unmatched support for the PNG graphics format. Photoshop was used primarily for bitmap and photo editing.