It's gone quiet around here 🦗

But I haven't gone anywhere. Kelly Creative Tech hums along fairly quietly, while the majority of my time is spent with Lincoln Loop. Over there, I'm Director of UX, managing crazy-talented teams who build ambitious projects like Firefox.com. (Here's a recent case study about some of the interesting challenges on that project.)

I'm slightly more active over on LinkedIn, and my personal social media du jour is BlueSky.

And most importantly, since you're here, you're probably looking for me in a professional capacity. I still take the occasional small business project, because I like to keep my hands in the full end-to-end process of publishing a site once in a while. And generally, I just enjoy what I do and I like helping my friends find success online.

But if you have a bigger project, you can expect me to go into sales-mode with my Lincoln Loop hat on, where we're much better equipped to build a full team, meet aggressive deadlines, and build amazing products.

Either way, e-mail is still the best way to connect. I'm always open to coffee if you're nearby, or a Zoom call if you aren't.

Let's build something cool together.

Going all-in with JAMStack

I’ve been building websites under the Kelly Creative Tech brand since 2008. For most of that time, I used one version or another of a custom Content Management System (CMS) that my brother Issac and I built. Building our own CMS was an exciting challenge, and in many ways was the catalyst for both of our careers.

User-Generated Themes with Django and CSS Variables

I've been spending most of my time over the last couple of years building Design Systems and CSS frameworks as part of the amazing team at Lincoln Loop, working on projects for Mozilla, Wharton Interactive, and others. This week, I had a chance to write a post on the Lincoln Loop blog exploring some real-world problem-solving with modern CSS. Give it a read:

User-Generated Themes with Django and CSS Variables.

Thank you to all who helped make the Elastic{On} 2017 ballet project a success

Without a doubt, we owe the success of this project to our amazing team. For nine months you've each taken this crazy vision seriously and professionally, and we couldn't have pulled it off without each of you.

SEO and Social Media Marketing

If you're interested in a good starting point for Search Engine Optimization, I wrote about that a couple of years ago and it's all still relevant today. The bottom line is that we write our code, and the software that you'll use to create new content, for optimal search engine findability. I don't typically make a big fuss over this, as I'm simply following industry-standard best practices. Technically well-formatted code is the minimum starting point for a good website.

Presenting web design work

When we designers were in college, we were taught how to elegantly present design work. Black boards, spray mount, and $20 inkjet prints have been the norm for years for branding work and print design client presentations. When presenting web design work however, this method work causes many easily-avoidable problems:

A note to students: you should learn this stuff.

I promised to compile a list of resources for CHS students several months ago … and now that the school year is about over, I suppose it's now or never.

Search Engine Optimization isn't all that scary

Search Engine Optimization is important for any web project. From a technical standpoint, we at Kelly Creative Tech do everything right: we follow the most up-to-date reccomendations of the Search Engine companies and steer clear of any manipulative coding practices that could get your site banned.

Kelly Creative Tech
1185 Greiner Dr.
Zanesville, Ohio

kasey@kellycreativetech.com