About.

My name is Dan Ott

I am a freelance web developer. I've worked professionally in the web development field since 1999, and full-time since 2007. I count myself as one of those lucky few people who actually enjoy what they do.

I was born and raised in Lakewood, Ohio (the first city west of Cleveland), and currently reside in Bloomington, Indiana, near the Indiana University campus, with my beautiful wife, Emily and our awesome and ridiculous dog, Lucy. I try to make it back to the CLE as often as I can, which is not often enough.

I also spend a lot of time playing disc golf, walking the dog, and reading random books.

I can be found on Twitter, and, occasionally, on Flickr.

Contact

I can be contacted thusly.

About what i do

What I do is front-end development. What that means is this: I work closely with IAs, designers and back-end developers to develop the front-end code necessary to get your site looking and acting exactly how it was designed to. Using hand-coded HTML, CSS, and Javascript, I take your wireframes and designs all the way to a full prototype ready for rapid development and integration with your back-end system.

I work hard to free your designers from worrying about things like browser constraints and dumbing down their designs so that they are easier to code. With the tools available today, there isn't much that can't be accomplished with plain old html, css, and javascript, while keeping an eye on the old standbys - accessibility, validity, optimizations (of size, speed, and search engine), and, above all, craftsmanship.

I've also spent a lot of time building templates, themes, and customizing both Wordpress and ExpressionEngine.

About this site

This site you're looking at is the second major version of dtott.com. It was released in February of 2010, after a large chunk of time alternating between frantic development and total neglect. This site is built using Expression Engine, with templates, HTML, CSS, and Javascript all hand-coded by yours truly. I'm happy with it, and I hope you are too.

This site makes use of several third-party pieces of javascript: The ever popular and powerful jQuery and jQuery UI power 99% of the javascript on this site. The amazing fonts that you (probably) see are provided by TypeKit. Text hyphenation by the jQuery plugin Hyphenate. Feature checking by Modernizr. And, for browsers that can not support CSS Transformations, the very awesome jQuery plugin Roundabout. This site is also taking advantage of Andy Clarke's Universal IE6 Stylesheet.

As I mentioned, I hand-wrote the rest of the javascript and CSS. It is also compressed and served as one file. Here are the different files used, uncompressed, if anyone is interested: CSS, global javascript, portfolio page javascript.

Colophon:

This site was designed almost exclusively in Firefox, using my Macbook Pro. Code was written using the amazing and incredible Coda. Version control is provided by a Subversion repository hosted on Beanstalk and controlled by Versions. IE testing facilitated by VMWare Fusion. Distraction provided by Tweetie.