Hello, and welcome to the online portfolio of Jonathan Fenske!
My name is Jonathan Fenske and I am a web developer and web designer. I work as a web developer for a company in Syracuse, New York. My responsibilities include resolving bugs and creating enhancements for their software. On my spare time I do freelance web designing.

The backend of this website (which is responsible for generating the pages) is powered by PHP and the Zend Framework. The content is stored in a MySQL database, and on supported browsers, loaded dynamically with Ajax. The backend was built this way mostly for practice. This is a small website, and generally this method is used for larger sites. The front end of the site (which is what you see) uses a JavaScript toolkit named Dojo. This performs most of the Ajax calls that load page content, and is also responsible for any special effects.

The purpose of this website is for me to showcase my technical abilities. You can use this site to view web designs that I have created for different clients. You can also use this site to view different web applications or other web projects I have worked on. This site also includes software that I have created using the Dot NET Framework for the Windows operating system.

Website Designer
I am a web designer. In the past I mostly just used Adobe Dreamweaver to create designs. Now I usually do a lot of this manually, as I feel I have more control while writing the HTML and CSS myself. It is nice to build pages using editors that do most of the work for you, but in my opinion, is sometimes better to do this yourself.

When I create web designs, I keep usability in mind. I design websites to be original, yet familiar. A lot of sites have certain elements arranged and positioned in a way that has become familiar and popular. Changing the order of such elements could potentially confuse users when they view a website. Usability is important and I treat it as such.

You can view a few of my previous web designs on the Web Designs page.

Website Developer
More often than designing websites, I spend much of my time with web development. I enjoy developing websites more than designing them. My favorite server-side scripting language is PHP. I use it on almost all of my projects. I prefer building websites with PHP rather than building them using plain HTML, because you are able to create more dynamic, content-rich websites. I also have minor experience using ASP for website development. Most of my projects contain a small control panel to edit pages and other content.

Windows Software Developer
I create applications for the Windows operating system on my spare time. I started this in High School, and at the time I used Visual Basic 6. I built a few useful applications using Visual Basic 6, but over the years I deleted or lost most of these. As time passed, I starting working with the Dot NET Framework with Visual Studio Express editions. Eventually I began to use Visual CSharp instead of Visual Basic, and it is what I still use today. You can see some of my applications in the Application pages.

Web Application Developer
I have started to work on a few web applications. One such application is Encryption Pad Online. This will allow people to work on documents or text files, and save them to their computer in an encrypted file. The resulting file will only be able to be displayed in Encryption Pad with the password. The resulting files will be compatible with the Windows version of this application. This project is currently being built and is estimated to be finished sometime early in 2013.