Elisabeth Wilhelm has been playing around on the net since 1999, picking up design skills in HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript, and PHP and using her art school and media background to design beautiful and usable websites. Her main website, Absynthe Muse, an international young writers community numbering almost 2,000 members and run on Joomla!, has placed second in the "Creativity & Culture" category for the World Summit Youth Award (WSYA) at the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society, Phase II in Tunisia. She has also developed websites for UNA-USA Southern New York Divison, and for the Public-Private Alliance Foundation, among other nonprofit and arts-oriented groups.
Building a website should be a pleasant and defining experience for any organization and its membership. An organization's website is an increasingly important calling card, a mobilization tool, and a place for forming community. A client's mission should be reflected in a dynamic, cutting-edge, yet user-friendly website that is widely accessible, cross-browser compatible, and is loaded with Web 2.0 features to engage the user.
Elisabeth Wilhelm is a big believer in feedback and education when is comes to building websites. It makes little sense for someone to build a custom-made car and hand someone the keys without showing them how to drive it; similarly, a website is designed for a client, and through a regular cycle of feedback, accompanied by staff training, should become self-sustaining without the need of expensive developer intervention to make simple changes once the website is up and running.
This is why she chooses to work in open-source frameworks where there are no barriers to entry. "Information should be free" is a credo that members of the open source coding community adhere to, allowing for anyone to take open-source software and customize it for their own use without paying for licenses or fees. Proprietary software is often constrictive and subject to market forces that don't guarantee the longevity of any particular software product, whereas open source software is constantly re-evaluated, revamped, and built open by thousands of people, using standards-aligned code, such as HTML, PHP, CSS, and XML. It explains why Firefox, an open-source browser, has become the popular alternative to the buggy and hacker-prone Windows Internet Explorer.
The bottom line is that no arcane knowledge should be needed to understand how a website works, much less to administer it. A good website is beautiful in its simplicity.
Email elisabeth[at]sent[dot]com about yourself, your website needs, and your time frame. Elisabeth would be happy to discuss your needs over the phone, email, or IM.