In April, 2005 I received a phone call from Conor McNamara, who was looking for somehelp building a custom dress site online. Full of energy and eager to take on new challenges I jumped at the chance of building a site that allowed women to design and customize their own dresses. With the help of my friend and colleague, Joe Riopel, who handled the back-end development as well as Conor and his group, Dress by Design was born! Programming responsibilities were later transitioned to another friend, Bill Rowell who also does an excellent job.

Of course revision one was way over budget, it was my first major freelancing project built from the ground up. I think Joe and I estimated it would take 30 hours to build out start to finish. 100+ hours later we were scrambling to finish while simultaneously thinking of ways to play down the unexpected cost elevations to the client. Luckily, the family-run team at Dress By Design was completely understanding of the situation. It became the beginning of a remarkable relationship.

Essentially we took Conor’s excellent design comps and turned them into intelligent HTML markup and CSS. I gained some great experience in working with another designer, and in the process was able to influence the look and functionality of the site by implementing many of my own insights. I’m particularly proud of one of the technical accomplishments I was able to phase into the “dress design” page where the user is able to dynamically change all of the styling options and/or fabric selections in real time (via javascript and iframes methodologies circa 2005).

Recent exposure on Good Day Sacramento and an award on Readers Digest America’s Best 100 for Best Web Weavers has finally made me feel like Dress By Design is finally getting the recognition it deserves.

Check out Dress By Design for yourself.