Derek Misler

Asheville Convention & Visitors Bureau

As the only developer on staff, my job was to maintain our entire web presence. We started with a .NET-backed site, and one of my first tasks was to create a matching mobile site and responsive blog theme. While I was on board, I oversaw two redesigns, first with Coldfusion and more recently with a responsive site that was built with Node/MongoDB on the back-end and a custom JS templating language, Goatee, on the front-end. I've been in charge of creating all print- and web-related assets for our various marketing campaigns, all of the data analysis of those campaigns, and two long-form, media-rich, highly interactive, award-winning web applications. I also oversaw the email marketing program, which included designing and creating the email templates, capturing and segmenting demographic data, and the analysis of the data we received after each campaign.

Houser Shoes, Inc.

During my time at Houser Shoes, I was part of a 3 person team that redesigned their e-commerce website. We also created a custom CMS based on Magento, which utilized primarily PHP and MySQL and was tied to their inventory and accounting systems. Photography is a part of my design background, so I was also the lead product photographer. Many hours were spent taking and editing and uploading photos of shoes. Just so many shoes. I was also in charge of the email marketing program, including all of the design and implementation of each campaign, as well as the analysis of the results after each campaign.

Freelance

A lot of branding at first, but eventually full-time web development. Mostly Shopify, SquareSpace, or Wordpress, but I recently had a chance to work on a custom Go-backed (Buffalo) UI/component library.

Precision Printing

Though this isn't web-related, I still think my experience working in a print shop can be seen in my work as a developer. When a job consists of tens of thousands of prints, the whole process requires an extremely detail-oriented approach, efficiency, and communication among all members of the team to ensure we weren't making mistakes that would cost us a lot of time/paper/ink/money to fix.

The Appalachian Newspaper

I worked with an intern to establish an online presence for The Appalachian newspaper, while still maintaining my role as the lead graphic designer.

Appalachian State University

I chose to study graphic design in an arts department. I already had a grasp on front-end web development techniques and continued to study them during this time, but the curriculum path I chose focused on web design while also teaching color theory, typography, and layout design in a group setting. Outside of designing for the web, we also had the opportunity to learn Flash/Actionscript game development.