Sagehen Studio

Your
Secret
Weapon

little package logo

Caroline
I build (and fix) websites
Mammoth Lakes, California & Hawthorne, Nevada

Hello.

I’m Caroline, the PHP developer behind Sagehen Studio. I build, customize and repair WordPress plugins, themes, and websites. I began hand-coding websites in 1998 and took up using WordPress in 2003 (the year it was released). A circuituous path brought me to full-time coding; in the past I’ve been a trauma 1 hospital nurse and a hat maker.

I love coding! In my “spare time” through the years, I’ve launched many websites for friends and small business clients. I have also authored themes and plugins for WordPress. I specialize in migrations, full-stack build-outs, and e-commerce, often creating custom post types, dynamic forms, and thoughtful, end-user-focused architecture to help my customers deliver complex information and get results.

The past 6 years I have been neither nurse nor hatmaker, instead launching and maintaining many dozens of websites and a small fleet of plugins from near the top of the beautiful Owens Valley in California and Nevada. My pastimes include wrenching on my old Volkswagen Westfalia, hiking all over the gorgeous Southwest USA, and baking sweets.

Selected Projects

Eastern Sierra Interpretive Association

A PSD and an extremely short turnaround time… and voilà! This website absolutely highlights my ability to work quickly.

Lone Pine Communications

Lone Pine Communications is an Internet and VoIP service provider in a tiny town — but didn’t want their website to look “tiny town.”

Eastern Sierra Land Trust

This gorgeous website is now primarily maintained by the client, who excels with and enjoys the ability to do so.

Sierra Mountain Center

Whereas the design may be simple, the Wordpress CMS is well-harnessed to clearly and consistently present a massive amount of information.

Vanagain

Vanagain got a big leg up when I converted a 3400-product spreadsheet inventory into WooCommerce, bringing it into the 21st century.

Additional Work

A few other recent websites I've built solo (from designers' PSDs) include: bishopvisitor.com, muledays.org, nmschoolofyoga.com, inyo.org, esaudubon.org, Bishop Creek Resort, Rock Creek Lodge, Il Mandorlo Italy (my design), Baja Bungalows (design and logo), Reds Meadow (design, navigation, copyediting) and more... (List current as of fall 2018, changes since may not reflect my work)

I also built and maintain a personal multi-site Wordpress installation, with two blogs and several e-commerce storefronts, at web.little-package.com.

Sagehen Studio on Github

My Skills

  • OOP PHP and PHP-based CMS, esp Wordpress
  • Writing, troubleshooting, and optimizing PHP/JavaScript/HTML/CSS/MySQL
  • Migrations to and from Wordpress
  • E-commerce use within WP, especially WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
  • Saavy & speedy recovery of hacked websites
  • Complex interactive form creation with Gravity Forms (and without)
  • Boundless customization using hooks, templates, custom child themes and (custom) plugins
  • Information architecture and considerate industry/audience-specific semantic
  • User interface and useability, especially for the vision impaired
  • Graphic design — honed eye for color, negative space, typography
  • Utilities like SVN, Git, SFTP, WHM, cPanel, phpMyAdmin, PhpStorm, BBEdit, MAMP, Photoshop, Affinity, Illustrator and Indesign
  • Troubleshooting, often for clients who cannot explain the problem
  • Using language clients can understand
  • Brainstorming solutions that make clients' lives easier - and make them money
  • Creating sites clients can use