Joel Smith Media

I'm currently a news developer for the Spokesman-Review, the daily paper in Spokane, Wash., where I work with colleagues in the newsroom and on the web team to build new features, transform old legacy ones, and help maintain a sprawling codebase.

My focus is on helping newsrooms, NGOs, and other mission-minded organizations to understand and overcome their digital challenges and to tell their stories across a variety of media. Especially those working in science, research, journalism, transportation, education, the environment, the arts, and international affairs.

And while that often entails hard skills — stuff like optimizing Django queries and parsing JSON feeds — the soft skills are just as important: talking through problems, questioning assumptions, developing messages, organizing workflows, making sure everybody remembers how to log in and reset their passwords...

What do you want to build? What problem do you need to solve? How can I help?

Favorite Projects

The Spokesman-Review

Visual Thinking Strategies

This groundbreaking arts education group needed a better way to organize their data, communicate with their members, and spread the word about their vital work teaching critical thinking skills. Together, we rebuilt their entire online operation from scratch. I worked with them from content strategy through design, layout, and some highly advanced functionality — including integrations with WooCommerce and Salesforce. Along the way, we've focused on solving problems for both their users and their own organization.

Downtown Spokane Partnership

The esteemed Baroque did the design and I did the front end and the guts of this deceptively complicated site. The site is all smiles and sunshine on the outside. And indeed I customized the back end to make it as peaceful and harmonious as possible for DSP staff to manage the site on their own and continue to tell the organization's story, without developer help. But deep in the back end, the site does the hard work of consuming public data, merging it with in-house tracking information, and producing the accurate tax assessments the DSP needs each year to keep growing downtown Spokane.

Winston Wächter Fine Art

I stepped in to rescue this project for a Seattle/New York modern art gallery that had been burned by a firm that had over-promised and under-delivered. Working closely together, we created a simple design and back-end system that properly highlighted their art and made everyday maintenance a comparative breeze. We also recently completed an accessibility overhaul and launched a new search feature.

Porch

As the marketing front-end developer for this exploding online home-improvement start-up, I built many sites, including their consumer and professional blogs (the former of which you see here) and their from-scratch customer pages.

Skyway Solutions

I turned a Wordpress site around for this Seattle community nonprofit in just two weeks — including mobile responsiveness and a highly customized, multilingual community survey component.

Whitworth University

To celebrate the 125th anniversary of this local institution, I worked with school officials to create a dynamic Wordpress site that incorporated content from a commemorative special-edition book and equipped them with tools to lead a year-round giving campaign.

Mas Pinet

I exchanged a week at this French bed and breakfast for the construction of a new site. Not a bad trade.