Don Schaefer: About The Artist

Born in 1981 on the east coast, Don Schaefer lived in several states across the country before eventually settling in the midwest. From 2000-2004 Don Schaefer attended Northern Illinois University to get his Bachelor of Fine Arts in the field of multimedia. After graduating, purchasing a home and spending some time on his own, a series of events led Don to accept Jesus Christ as his savior and his life started anew. In 2009, Don met his future wife & step-son (pictured with Don to the right), and a year later, they tied the knot. Currently, Don Schaefer works as a web designer and front-end developer for a company based in Orland Park, IL, called Apps Communications.

Video Editing

Originally hired by Apps Communications in 2005, Don Schaefer started out his career by filming, editing and uploading promotional videos for small business websites and auto dealership websites. Don would start by setting up the lighting, camera equipment, microphone, green screen and teleprompter in the video studio. Once the actor/actress arrived, a little time would be spent greeting the individual and preparing him/her for filming. Don would generally go through each script a few times as a warm-up, coaching the talent as needed along the way before recording 2 or more perfect run-throughs and moving on to the next script. After the filming session was done, Don created time logs for each tape & brought all the footage into the computer for editing in Adobe Premier. At this point, Don would strip out the green screen, replace it with an animated background, clean up the sound in Adobe Soundbooth & re-import it, and make any other adjustments necessary before exporting the final video.

Website Design & Development

It wasn't long before Don Schaefer started doing work on websites themselves though. After the bulk of the filming work had been finished, Don began working on the template websites that Apps Communications was providing at the time. He also began colaborating with the company's owner, Dave Apps, on the search engine optimization efforts of several websites. In the process of discussing template capabilities with one of the company's clients, Don realized that what the client really needed was a custom-built website with an integrated e-Commerce system and proceeded to sell them on the idea. The customer agreed, and Don started working on it right away.

Over the past several years, Don Schaefer has gained a lot of experience in both web design and web development. Although familiar with GUI-based programs like Adobe Dreamweaver, Don grew frustrated with all of the extraneous code they create early in his career. As a result, most of his HTML/CSS work has been done by hand. This has paid off for him in a number of ways. Perhaps most importantly, Don has gained an intimate knowledge of how to write clean code that will be interpreted correctly across multiple browsers to ensure that the visual integretiy of his work isn't comprimised by the code behind it. Additionally though, Don has found that the problem-solving skills learned through this process have proven useful when he is faced with the occassional actionscript, javascript or asp.net project that his job sometimes also entails.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine optimization is perhaps the most unique and peculiar addition though to Don Schaefer's skillset as a web designer. The experience that he has in search optimization gives him a unique perspective and insight that few other website designers share. As a result, he is able to take certain optimization techniques into consideration during the design phase of a website's layout and information architecture, long before a professional SEO team even begins working on it. This is a tremendous advantage to business owners, as it ensures they won't need to have the site re-designed at a later point in order to rank well in Google.