The Toro Company Great projects require great clients, and Toro is definitely one of them. A number of external and internal initiatives at the billion-dollar company have been centered around web technologies. I was fortunate enough to be involved in various stages of most of them. The most visible example is the Toro public site, which I redesigned this summer. I played a number of roles throughout this project, from the initial client pitch, to graphic design and copywriting, to coordinating the production staff. The challenge was to take a 600 page brochureware site designed by a traditional ad agency, and transform it into a true web presence for Toro. I completely overhauled the structure, layout, and navigation on the site which are now described in a web style guide. The result is a more visually appealing and more usable site. The first phase launch was scheduled to coincide with the 1997 Ryder Cup golf tournament, for which I developed and managed a $50,000 online advertising campaign. The project was a success, both in traffic and customer comments. I have also been involved in supply chain management applications which coordinate Toro and its distributor and dealer networks. They are, however, still very hush-hush so I will not go into them here.

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University of Minnesota Universities are notoriously slow in responding to external realities, but in the case of the University of Minnesota a strong commitment was made to web technologies in early 1996. I became a member of the small - almost renegade - web development team that was shaping the way the 60,000 person University provided services to its students and faculty, and the way it presented itself to the outside. The most revolutionary and successful part of the project was making a web based course registration system. We interfaced with the university's mainframe systems for the core process of adding classes, but we did not stop there. Bookstore databases were connected to tell students which books they would need for each class, and digitized maps told them where each class was. Various academic and financial deadlines were also included. This is where I learned the power of system integration. Best of all, everything was done through a simple web browser which could print out a customized "Enrollment Statement" at the end of the process. When it went live at the end of summer 1996 it was the first web based registration system in the nation, and became an instant hit.

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SearchAmerica SearchAmerica is an ambitious project that combines data from providers like Metromail, Equifax and MapQuest; and makes it searchable through a simple web-based interface. Qualified users can look up phone numbers, address changes, wealth ratings, and even social security numbers. An estimated 95% of American households are covered in the system. My focus in this project was designing the identity and user interface, as well as planning out the required functionality. I teamed up with a systems programmer who handled most of the low-level implementation. Several branded versions of the system are already in use at a number of financial and healthcare companies.

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Arkzin A Croatian Wired-like magazine minus the ads. That's the best description I can come up with for Arkzin. It covers everything from Joseph Beuys to the latest Prodigy album with a hefty dose of social commentary. All in all it is a great creative outlet for experimentation that corporate sites cannot allow. Visit it for the graphics, because you probably won't be able to understand the text.

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