My name is Steve Day and I am the owner of Elken Design. I am an Idaho native and live in the country overlooking the Snake River and Owyhee Mountains. My address shows me in Wilder, Idaho, but I am located out in the midst of three small towns: Marsing, Homedale and Wilder. I enjoy the outdoors and go hiking or fishing whenever possible. I have been building and maintaining websites for about ten years, mostly as a self-taught amateur. I worked for a semiconductor plant for 20 years before getting laid off in 2008. At that point I decided to go to school for some formal Website Design training and chose to attend Sessions School of Design in a series of online courses.
Education is important these days; things change quickly and you need to learn the new and upcoming techniques to keep up in the game. Here are my current educational qualifications:
- Boise State University
AAS Degree in Electronics Technology
Graduated in 1991 - Sessions School of Design
Web Design Certificate
Completed in November 2009
I plan on taking more website classes in the future; this time in the programming side of things. I want to be able to add on-line shopping, databases, JavaScript and more to websites that I design. I need to learn about these aspects of building websites!
Here are some useful skill sets that I have acquired over the years:
- My skill levels with MS Word and MS Publisher are fairly high; with MS Excel, MS Visio and MS PowerPoint I rate myself average.
- I have some newly developed skills with Adobe© Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks, and I am working on learning InDesign and Illustrator.
- I have experience taking quality digital photographs and using PhotoShop to prepare them for use on websites or in publications.
Here are some projects that I am working on or have successfully completed:
- I am currently maintaining and updating six websites, five of which I designed and built. Most of these were done before I learned to use CSS and I have plans to upgrade all of them of this coming winter.
- I designed and published newsletters for a local bass fishing organization for several years. This included collecting articles and photographs, designing and laying out the newsletters, getting the newsletters printed at a local newspaper publisher, generating mailing labels and getting the newsletters sorted and bulk mailed.
- I designed and assembled a color glossy program for a large regional bass tournament. I was not involved with the printing portion of this project.
- I have written numerous reports and articles for websites and newsletters. In my previous job I wrote and edited technical manuals and documents.
- I have designed numerous examples of custom raffle tickets, business cards, advertising posters, catalogs and other assorted formatted documents.