About Me

To start off with the very basics, my name is Michael Ellis and I am a web designer. I dabble in both Photoshop and my favorite code editor often and am constantly looking to hone my craft.

My first real experience as a designer came in the form of hacking a computer game in the early 2000's creating my own in-game content that was shared with others to also use. I started my own site and this is where I began to get my feet wet in HTML and CSS.

After High School I went to Messiah College as a Computer Science major. I stuck with that for 3 semesters but it just wasn't for me. I made a switch to Marketing and thoroughly enjoyed the courses from there on out. All 4 years, and 3 summers, on campus I worked in the Admissions office as a webmaster. It was much more of a maintenance role than a design role, but it enabled me to further immerse myself in the web and the design of sites.

After I graduated in the spring of 2008, I was employed as a web designer at a company that is a leader in check printing. My role was mostly to design marketing emails, advertisements, and update their many sites. In June 2009 I was moved to another department that was focused in a different direction, Identity Theft protection. In this position I was relied upon to design comps and then code these pages to meet many demanding deadlines. This period was very intense and required me to learn quickly and then deliver what was asked of me. Needless to say, my design and coding skills took an exceptional leap forward.

In my curret position, I am working heavily with jQuery to create interactive experiences for the users of the site's I am building. jQuery is an incredible javascript library that gives you a solid foundation to build off of. I am adamant about clean code and using standards. It makes everything just work better.

Ever since I went to college, I have been working freelance projects on the side and I try to still be active in that arena. I enjoy being a part of startup projects and have several ideas for my own that hopefully will be developed someday. In the meantime I am more than happy to continue to improve as a designer and front-end developer.