Tramel Woodard

Tramel Woodard is a career website that chronicles my career path, resume, portfolio, technologies and personal projects. I created this website after returning to the United States in 2015 and being asked for examples of my work and requests for my projects and portfolio. The site you are currently visiting is also a project!


Summary

Tramel Woodard is a site that was developed as a need to quickly convey my skill set to potential recruiters, vendors, HR workers and hiring managers. As a full stack developer, I have lengthy experience in not only software development, but also web design, UI/UX design, graphic design, illustration, music, audio, video, marketing, language proficiency, technical writing and book publishing. Tramel Woodard allows me to communicate to potential employers the full range of my experience within a short length of time.

Technology

Tramel Woodard started as a basic "five page" design with a resume, abbreviated portfolio and contact information. The technology stack for the first two years was HTML5, CSS3, vanilla JavaScript and jQuery for simple DOM manipulation.

As I returned to the US from China, the scope of my abilities and my existence in the new "gig economy" sent the direction of the website into a centralized "branding" of myself as a person, as well as all of my skillsets. A need for blogs, a portflio, project list, technology list and a fully dynamic resume meant I would need a scalable database solution with normalized tables for relation between multiple pages. I decided to go the "start up" route and create a LAMP stack, powered by the Laravel framework as middleware, and a front end presence of both processed PHP, as well as JavaScript.

Notes

Due to my dislike of empty footers, I felt this website really was my opportunity to show potential employers my ability not only as a developer, but those of marketer and technical writer. Realizing that the footer is the brand's opportunity to communicate with corporate entities, as well as potential employees and partners, I utilized heavy menu linking to show visitors that I am available for multiple forms of interaction. This includes a direct "hire me" page, financial supporting some of my anthropological activities, interning for me and viewing my media and press coverage.

UPDATE (2018/9/1)

As I end my contract with ACT, I will be paying special attention to Tramel Woodard as I decide the next step in my career path. Continuing with the Laravel framework, I will in addition work on the blog area, social media presence and possibly a "live chat" button and some form of private smartphone app integration.