Victoria Gramlich | California Web Designer

I am a Digital Marketing Specialist.

I am also a Web Developer, Graphic Designer and Content Creator.

"Jack of All Trades", Web Designer at Heart

I enjoy learning and practicing in all digital mediums - video, audio, SEO, print, graphics or web, I can do it all.

View my Recent Multi-Media

Mobile, Tablet & Desktop Design

I design websites that work well and look great everywhere with responsive design - no dimension left behind.

View the Mobile/Desktop Case Study

Analytics and Testing vs. Guessing

I am familiar with tools like Google Analytics, Sessioncam and A/B testing to find out what makes customers tick.

View the 12% Lift in Signups Case Study

Key Skills: Web Design, UI/UX Design, HTML, CSS, jQuery, PHP, Wordpress, Content Management Systems, Google Analytics, SEO, Sessioncam, Responsive Design, Debugging, Bootstrap, Photoshop, Illustrator, Graphic Design, Ad Design

Experience

Web Designer - JOGS (Expo Company) July 2016 - present

In the heart of downtown Los Angeles, I was hired to join the JOGS team as a web designer to promote the JOGS Tucson Gem and Jewelry Show and JOGS's various other ventures online and off.

View the "Jack of All Trades" Compilation of JOGS Projects

Lead Designer / Digital Designer - Mindable (Marketing Company) March 2015 – November 2015 (9 months)

At Mindable I was hired to become their first in-house designer. During my time at Mindable I worked with the marketing team to create landing pages, app design, create advertisement graphics, and organize our outsource design team.

View the App Design Case Study

Web Designer - Go Auto (Auto Marketing Team) April 2012 – November 2014 (2 years)

My position at Go Auto focused on front-end development as part of a 2-man web team. Together we were able to bring 32+ sites into the modern era, redesigned their product search functions numerous times, and kept them constantly updated with the newest offers from our dealers.

View the Print to Web Case Study

Web Design Intern - Primal Tribe (Digital Marketing Agency) May 2011 – August 2011 (4 months)

With Primal Tribe, I was able to work on updating and slicing projects including Valard utility contractors, OpsMobil oilfield aviation transporters, and the board game Duck Soup.

View Projects I Worked On

Freelance Web Design 7+ Years

Working freelance off and on has been a great way for me to branch out and work with different types of clients.

Diploma in Digital Media & IT, Digital Communication and Media/Multimedia 2010 – 2012 (2 years, N.A.I.T.)

2-year full-time studies in Digital Media, including graphic design and web design. Received an Outstanding Achievement award upon graduation for best self-initiated project and Dean's Honour Roll.

Recent Projects

Learning Video and Audio Editing The Academy, Feb 2016 – Present

I wanted to add a few new related skills to my marketting repetoire, so I started a series that helps explain gaming mechanics to new videogame players. With this project came an incredible amount of SEO learning, UX via video design, cross-multimedia tactics and social networking skills. Between this project and past ones, my channel has over a 36,000 subscribers, 3.5 million views, 16 million minutes of watch time, and has been recognized and applauded on multiple occasions by members of the EA Games Bioware team! Not bad for a "learning project"!

View the Series Landing Page

When people ask me where I grew up, the answer is complicated. I was born in Ontario, Canada, and since then have lived in Colorado Springs, Quebec, Washington state, and multiple cities in Alberta, Canada. Although moving around that much was tough at times, one thing that I was able to find that could easily move with me was the web. I got my start learning to design and code through online games, and eventually went on to learn it professionally at NAIT, a well known technical college in Alberta. I really like to make things for the web.

I enjoy exploring outdoors, especially in California's desert climate. It's such a change from Canada's snowy winter months and lush summers. I now live there with my husband, a student at Mt. SAC.

I also enjoy playing online games with friends across the world. It's given me the chance to lead and work with hundreds of like-minded players, be invited across the country for a press conference, attend the wedding of a friend in Vegas and organize a meetup in New York City. It ties in well with my work, by allowing me to design and code sites about the games I play, for the people I play with.

(909) 767-5056 mail@victoriacalifornia.com

"Jack of All Trades"

Whenever I have a free time, I enjoy learning new skills so I can make whatever's needed for a project without having to hire an outside freelancer, and create things in exactly the way I want them to be seen and used. So far I've added analytics, SEO writing, UX, audio editing, video editing, photography, photo editing, print design and graphic design to my web designer toolbag. Some of these skills were picked up through my hobbies, and others from the various companies I've worked with during my career.

Web Design

Web Design has come a long way - and web designers are expected to know a lot more than simply creating websites. Research, multiple iterations, and many hours went in to designing the new JOGS website, with the goals of allowing more guests to sign up and increasing the prestige of the gem and jewelry show in mind. I gave their website a complete overhaul form what they had before, by preserving only the exisiting databases and article entries, and re-designing the entire structure to be more user-friendly, and the CSS and graphics to have lower load times and higher mobile usability.

I completely redesigned the expo's website, to give it a "luxury" feel

UX Design

"User experience designis the process of enhancing customer satisfaction by improving the usability, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the customer and the product." Designing with user experience in mind is one of my favorite things to do - I enjoy creating websites that make it easy for the average person to use - whether they are new to using technology, or have been using the internet since they were in kindergarten. I like creating websites that are simple to understand, and using different tools to make processes like signing up for accounts or searching for details easier and faster to do. Some tools I use to increase user-friendliness are Google Analytics, Sessioncam, and User Surveys.

In the above image, we decreased frustration for users who had forgotten they had already registered by notifying them if they had already signed up with that email. We also made the "Forgot Password" button immediately accessible for those who needed it.

SEO (Search Engine Optimizaton)

There are two major parts to having your content show up early in search results, and as a web designer, I focus heavily on both of them: the techical aspects, and the organic written content. Creating great SEO is more than just perfect keyword use and fast loading times - it means creating a great experience online that makes visitors want to use your website! It can also mean using tools like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster to analyze what pages vistors are using on your site - and to find out what users may be looking for that doesn't already exist online.

Graphic Design

Although I'm primarily a web design, I can be a graphic designer in a pinch. Sometimes you happen to need a small graphic that is "fun with emojis", and luckily I've already got Photoshop open for you.

Surprisingly, this "text chat" ad design was not designed for young millenials - it actually was targetted towards and performed well with an older age group that primarily used iPhone devices. It's amazing what types of insights you can get by using analytics instead of guessing.

Print Design

Every time I've taken on a new position I've learned a little more about print design - and in my current position I've learned a lot more than I was expecting to. Bleeds? Margins? Safe zones? I've got it covered!

This flyer was specifically designed with international guests in mind - see the beauty of nature in Tucson Arizona, and an Arizona Fire Agate gemstone on the bottom left photo!

Video Editing

I haven't learned how to shoot video yet, but I've gotten great at compiling footage, audio and images into advertisements and how-to's. I also own a professional microphone and can do my own voice-recordings and voice-editing for audio in a pinch.

I took up video-making as a hobby, and it translated well into my current position. The script, voice recording, audio editting, and video editting were all self-taught - there's very little I can't learn when I put my mind to it. Two things I can't learn: diving into a pool and cartwheels. Never got a hang of those.

But when it comes down to it...

I'm web designer at heart!

Mobile, Tablet & Desktop Design

When the numbers show your visitors are accessing your site primarily on a mobile device, it's important to make sure their experience is optimized for speed, presentation and accessibility.

Our goal with this project was to create a PPC article-style landing page targeted towards mobile users. In the past, all pages had not been designed with mobile-first in mind.

Speed: We cut it down to the bare minimum with calls, CSS, and javascript. To do this we skipped Bootstrap, jQuery, and our usual cache of extra libraries. This means each element was designed from scratch, including the neurological header.

Readability: We created the initial design to read well on our most commonly tracked mobile device, found by Google Analytics. Spacing, padding, typography, line-height and other details were taken into careful consideration for easy mobile reading, while not completely abandoning design for desktop and mobile users that may visit the site.

Simplicity: No one likes a mobile site that is difficult to use. We minimized the design to the bare minimum to allow the visitor to focus on the content.

Results: A quickly created landing page, a speedy loading time for mobile visitors, and an overjoyed Marketing Specialist.

A/B Testing

A/B Testing allows designs to be tested and measured to find the most effective layout, message and funnel flow.

Our goal with this project was to improve the sign up rate for our new potential customers via a PPC landing page. In the past we had been guessing in the dark, but I used a combination of Google Analytics, Sessioncam, responsive design and previous A/B Testing to increase our sign up rate by 12%, or 35,000 more sign ups per year.

This was my final findings report, to go with the other tests tracked in our company Wiki so test results would never be lost or forgotten.

Original

(Original) The original black sky lander.

Change

(Variation) Creating a lander that has the least amount of friction for the user as possible. All the input fields are separated into distinct steps, the input fields have been optimized to be dynamic to the size of the screen, the layout will fit well even on small laptops, and any extraneous steps have been removed.

Hypothesis

Removing obstacles for the user will make them more likely to move along the funnel instead of leaving on certain steps.

Results

RUN #1 – Ran a version with the original, a version where there is no zodiac step and the user just puts in there date, and a version similar to this where the user chooses a zodiac. This test had a “exit intention popup” that was firing too early so I stopped it to remove it and make other small technical changes via Sessioncam.

RUN #2 – I ran the zodiac test again, and the results were so low I assumed something was wrong. This time I found errors that were preventing some users being able to progress through the funnel, and had made too drastic of a change to the last step that confused users. Sessioncam revealed these problems so I stopped an re-tested.

RUN #3 – All technical errors fixed as far as I can tell. Nice.

Analysis

Sessioncam is an invaluable tool to finding:

1) Where the user encounters errors

2) Where the user doesn’t have an error, but thinks they do (they are confused)

3) Where the user finds a step they simply do not want to fill out (example it is too long)

The new lander with less explanation before fill-out and the least friction durings steps is a winner.

App Design

Finding new markets can be one of the best ways to increase your reach, but our company found that entirely outsourcing a new mobile app would cost an arm and a leg. I took on this project with no prior knowledge of app design, and put it together from a simple wireframe from our General Manager and a lot of research in app design.

Our goal with this project was to create a mobile app where users could easily access their free horoscope from their phones, and monetize it through either advertisements or a paid subscription. The designs needed to be passed on to a third party for coding and creation.

Finding a Style that Fit

I initially designed four layouts: three that would be easiest for readability and touch-mobile accessibility, and one that would be most similar to the theme our current customers were most familiar with. Through a contest on facebook, I designed a script that would easily count over a thousand votes cast through our Facebook comments - in the past, votes had been counted by hand. The message was clear, our customers really liked the classic circular design.

Design Mockups

The design started simple: 6 mockup pages, starting on the selection of their horoscope and navigating through the various services we would offer in the app.

The biggest challenge of this project was its ever-changing nature: features were being added and removed on a daily basis, and it was critical in the design that the user could easily navigate through the app to access all the services we offered. The design also needed to remain consistent throughout the whole app - the last iteration ended being over 30 pages long.

Print Design to Web Design

When working with print designers, it can sometimes be difficult to explain what types of things are and are not possible when translating material to the web. Other times, they can come up with great ideas that simply need the right amount of thought to get working.

This design was created by one of our Graphic Designers at Go Auto, as part of the "Upgrade Parade" campaign. Her initial design was not automatically suited for the web, but we were able to work together with some brainstorming to make a design that tied in well with the print material.

The biggest challenge was making sure it worked well with desktop, mobile, and every type of device in-between, because her design was so static it did not translate well to responsive design. This clever solution was made with percentage positioning to allow the design to work on any size of desktop monitor, and responsive design to remove the hover effects for mobile devices.

http://www.gocolumbiafiat.com/upgradeparade

Web Intern

At Primal Tribe, I was able to intern over a summer between semesters at NAIT. This experience gave me a really solid look into how quickly websites could be designed and coded, gave me a lot of hands-on experience slicing designs from Adobe Photoshop, and gave me a great primer in working with content management systems.

These are some of the projects I helped slice or update, sites that are still functioning well 4 years later.

Some of our other clients included the Oilkings, Buster's Pizza, MCS, MCL Power, and RHHS.

Freelance

Freelance web designing gives me a chance to work with all kinds of clients, from varying types of technical backgrounds. These are some of the projects I have worked on with freelance clients.

San Juan Building and Contracting (2014): Martin required a website - and fast! To meet his time needs I built him a Wordpress site using a customized template so he could show off his projects online to potential customers. This entire project was completed in under two weeks.

Daye & Partners Chartered Accountants (2012): Tiez required an online presence for Daye & Partners to showcase their publications and staff. Although she had minimal content to work with, we were able to set up a professional looking site for her firm, including a publications area that she could upload public PDFs for her firm's clients.

SWTORConquest.com (2015): This was an interesting project I picked up for fun. The owner of the site was a great programmer - but wasn't very familiar with design or CSS. The goal was to get the site functional on mobile - which was a big challenge considering it is mostly tables and forms of variable lengths that change weekly.

Friendly Freelancing

I've gained a lot of my skills through designing and creating for my hobbies - and I've gained a lot of friends too! Many of them have seen my voluntary work and personal projects and come to me with ideas of their own.

My most recent friendly project was for a gaming friend who wanted to have "rank" badges for his gaming guild. He had a vague idea of what he wanted, and by researching similar examples and multiple iterations I was able to work with him to make pixel-perfect badges.

He also requested a background for his gaming website, with very little instructions. Creative projects to "make something cool" are some of the most fun. As for his response to the backgrounds, and I quote...