Home Portfolio Galleries

About Links Contact

About Me

I Matthew Kilander, a graduate from Northwestern Michigan College in 2005 with an associates degree in “Visual Communications”. While job hunting, I found a firm that allowed me to put my skills to use “Designing Web Sites & Shooting Photographs”. I am currently working full-time as a “Senior Web Developer” with Sutherlands Web Services. Since 1998, I have been designing & developing web sites that range from: my own personal site, school projects, and businesses around Northern Michigan. My current ranking with SWS is a "Senior Web Developer" with 1 assistant.

 

Photography Experience

My experience in digital photography began in 2002. My first camera was a compact Sony 5MP digital camera, then upgraded to the 8MP Panasonic, and now I shoot with a 10MP Nikon D80 (Digital SLR) "Click on the Photography Equipment heading on the right". As a digital photographer, my skills and techniques have greatly improved and only get better by the day. I specialize in Commercial and Macro photography with the ability to expand in other areas as well.

 

When shooting my photographs I usually shoot in RAW format (which is NEF for Nikon), so that I have 100% control when I am processing them. Each photo is examined for dust and then I make the necessary adjustments to finalize the photo. I want to make sure all my photographs are good enough to show on my site, I hate it when I view photographs and there is visible "dust" on it - it just looks like the photographer didn't care!

 

My photographs have been placed in Magazine publications, phone book advertisements, brochures, television commercials, books, competition winners, and even some are for sale at The Wooden Gallery in downtown Traverse City.

 

Check out my Professional gallery!

Make sure to check out the Commercial gallery too!

 

 

Web Site Experience

As an web site designer, I Matthew Kilander, have been designing and coding web sites since 1998. I was first introduced to web site development in the 10th grade by working with Microsoft FrontPage and Notepad. In the 12th grade, for part of the TBAISD programs, we used Dreamweaver (which is a combination of FrontPage and Notepad) and a little bit of Flash animation. In college at Northwestern Michigan College, I attended classes for Flash Animation, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Macromedia Dreamweaver and other classes that pertain to web site design and development.

 

I have worked on sites ranging in size from those having 1 page up to more than 1,000 pages. Being as experienced in this field of work, I know what works and what doesn't, so when I give someone advice or tips, they must understand what I am talking about! I'm always learning more techniques and I'm willing to learn even more.

 

Just recently, I decided to start designing and creating larger sites, this means building them wider to fit most modern screen resolutions. In the last ten years or so, users used a screen resolution of 800x600 pixels, but now they are exceeding that and many users are now using 1024x768 and some even larger than that to view information on their monitors.

 

I strive to develop each site to work with the major internet browsers such as: Firefox, IE7, IE6, Opera, and Safari - and to also run well on both operating systems "Mac" and "Windows". Many of the other browsers use the same browser engine, the only difference is the appearance and the name of the it.

 

IE6 is difficult (IE7 sometimes) to make sites compatible with it, due to the lack of supporting png "high quality transparent graphics" files and certain css styles, but there are fixes for these - which I try and use to overcome those issues.

 

Check out my portfolio!

* Click the headings below to view their content *

Click here for the current news & archives!

 

Photography by: Matthew Kilander - commercial and macro photographer, web site and web application designer

www.mattkilander.com   www.matthewkilander.com   www.mlk83.com