The Parkersburg Skate Plaza Foundation, Inc. is an ongoing project here in my city to raise awareness as well as money, to one day construct a skate boarding and freestyle rolling facility.

I've skated all my life. I was very involved in the construction of a small park in my home town Belpre, Oh back when I was in High School. I began my involvement with this new project fall of 2007 as I approached Roy and Shirely Collins about helping them develop their, at the time, very un-developed website. After a few meetings and a bit of work we launched the website November 4th 2007 and I have been blogging for them from a skater's point of view ever since.

My first building block was a logo they had already put together from some cheap clip art.

I tore the logo out of their brochure, wrinkled it up a a bit and snapped a photo. From this I developed our original splash page, using it as the background pattern as well as a forefront image, explaining who we were and what we were trying to accomplish.

I also slap the old logo over skate photos I take, to use as a water mark. I always include our url address. Always written in the eraser font as I feel it fits the vibe of our project as well as our kid like community of grown men whom everyone thinks are too old to still be skating. We should be taking up more mature sports that involve over sized bouncy balls or funny plaid pants.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/parkersburgskateplaza/

I recently changed our splash page as it was originally a nice photoshoped png file laid over the pattern background, but unfortunately our community probably makes up 90% of that annoying 40-50% of Internet Explorer users who refuse to update to 7.0.

So I just laid the original png over a photo of some random downtown Parkersburg buildings and saved it as a jpg everyone should be able to view online.

We have been selling tee-shirts to help raise money as well as advertise our cause. This is also a new logo drawn by my friend Eric Brown from Columbus, OH.

I know I have A.D.D when it comes to creative work, but the very first thing I got into was filming and editing. So, I also put out a podcast of local skating. Not everybody had quicktime or itunes so I usually use vimeo to host and post the edits on our blog.

I love vimeo waaaay more than copyrightube.....I mean youtube. The quality of their videos always have been way better and they have allot of neat features like custom background images like this. So when people come to our website, instead of seeing some random box a programmer at their company has thrown together, they get to see this fresh design with our logo.

Every yearParkersburg has a "Home Coming" festival and parade. This year weskated in the parade, all wearing our matching tee-shirts (awwwww) andI handed out 25 promotional dvds. Small number I know, but I paid forit out of my own pocket and I put it together on pretty short notice,hand cutting and print dvd covers myself, and burning each dvd one byone on my imac.

iTunes Podcast Page

Vimeo Page

Pretty much self explanatory flyer.

One of the most recent things I have done for this project was developing a petition page to leave feed back. I just used another Wordpress installation, which I use for the main home page as well. I rearranged some code and so it would be just one page and all the comments would be on the front page. That's it for now, but the saga continues....