WasteFarmers.com: The first non-news site I designed, but another Wordpress site. Waste Farmers is a new startup in Denver focused on finding better ways to reuse waste. It’s much more than a recycling company. John-Paul Maxfield, the company’s founder, and his partners, work with local companies — especially restaurants, hotels and schools — to build a closed-loop system. It’s a huge, important thing that they’re doing, and I was thrilled to be a part of redesigning their web site. The job came to me through the Ten|10 Group and Casey Nikoloric, who produced all the content for the site. The idea was to get as much information onto the site about who they are and what they’re trying to do. Because the company is trying to work with commercial clients, it was important to de-emphasize recycling, residential in particular. The business is a new one that not many potential clients actually understand. What we created is hopefully educational as well as informational. Wordpress works well for this sort of site that eventually need to be updated with news and product information in-house by a small staff.

InsideTheRockies.com: This site, devoted to cover of the Colorado Rockies, launched a few days after the Rocky closed. Tracy Ringolsby, one of the Rocky’s baseball writers, proposed the site on the Monday before the newspaper closed and we launched it the next Sunday, just two days after the newspaper indeed closed. Tracy, Jack Etkin and I reported news and wrote recaps of Rockies games during the 2009 season to keep ourselves active. A surprise to all three of us was how quickly we found a group of knowledgeable, dedicated Rockies fans. After years of being hammered in the comments section at the Rocky Mountain News by Rockies fans whose discourse seemed limited to two subject matter — 1) the Rockies suck and 2) the Rockies will always suck — we were pleasantly surprised to find a group of fans who liked the Rockies despite their history of suckness and just wanted to talk about baseball. In a horrible year all around, the experience at InsideTheRockies.com was one of the few pleasant distractions.

AmericasFish.com: I started this web site — as well as InsideDenverSports.com, which I have since let expire — to experiment in the days before the Rocky Mountain News closed. When I returned to the newspaper as the online sports editor in May 2008, I had minimal experience online. While I new HTML and the basics of CSS, I had built only one web site from scratch. I needed a place to experiment and also wanted a place to write about whatever came to mind.

IWantMyRocky.com: In December 2008 about a week after Scripps announced it was trying to sell the Rocky Mountain News, a group of Rocky staffers met at the Denver Press Club to decide if there was anything we could do to stop what seemed like (and indeed was) the inevitable. The result of that was this web site, which was intended to be a final scream into the void as well as a place to launch whatever we decided to launch, if anything. The design of the site was simple — at that point, of course, I still had a full-time job I was trying to save — and launched a little over a little over a day after we decided to launch it. I designed the site and maintained with the help of my wife (also a part-time staffer at the newspaper) and about a half dozen co-workers. When the newspaper closed, a group of reporters (primarily arts and transportation) continued to cover news on the site as we shopped around for backers for a full-fledged news site. Kim Humphreys, who organized the original meeting, took over the site as a non-profit in the summer of 2009 to further raise awareness of print’s plight.

DrewLitton.com: Drew’s site was one of the first I launched to give him a place to keep drawing while he navigated a brutal job market. He has managed to carry a large chunk of his devoted audience from the Rocky to his personal site. He has since taken control of the site and redesigned.

ColoradoSoccerNow.com: George Tanner, like so many of my Rocky colleagues, just wanted to continue writing after the Rocky closed. About a month after the newspaper closed, he launched this site devoted to the coverage of soccer in Colorado. He has since taken control of the site, the basic structure remains.

Inside-Lane.com: Kevin Flynn, the Rocky’s transportation writer, launched this site in the summer of 2009 as a placeholder to continue reporting on transportation issues in the state as he continued to explore funding for a larger news site around the same topic.

RockyMountainIndependent.com: The site was designed by Kyle Lynch, a newspaper web designer who joined our cause when he heard Kevin Flynn and me on Colorado Public Radio, announcing our intention to launch a news site called INDenverTimes (the site still exists, but the group of Rocky staff who launched the site left a month later when funding didn’t come through). The Rocky Mountain Independent was edited by myself, Cindy House and John Moore during a three-month experimental run the summer of 2009. This site is an archive of that work.

RockyMountainNews.com: Who knows how much longer this site will be active? I took over the sports section in May 2008 and redesigned the section from the inside out, emphasizing the blogs, photo galleries, videos and statistics that had been to that point more or less hidden on the web site.

Flash Trivia Games: Shortly before I returned to the Rocky, I designed the framework for a series of trivia games I eventually launched a couple months after joining the newspaper. The archive is still (at least, for now) active here. I reworked the games slightly and wrote a new batch for the Rocky Mountain Independent, which can be found here.