Wil Everts

User Experience Web Geek

I’m a veteran web designer and developer obsessed with building intuitive, pragmatic, and surprising web experiences that are as beautiful as they are functional. My experience working on large scale web products comes from my time working with companies like Yammer, Wikia, Top Fans, and Zivity.

I live in San Francisco with my girlfriend, Karie, and our English Bulldog, Cash. I love cycling, snowboarding, karaoke, baseball (Go Cardinals!), literature, poker, and hacking on web applications.

Author of Eeze

2012: Front-end development (LESS, CSS3, HTML5)

Eeze is a clean slate for professional developers creating custom applications. eeze.min.css comes out of the box at under 6K (BEFORE G-Zipping & you can gain ~2k by swapping to the HTML5 Reset) and sets up a great LESS workflow.

Unlike Twitter Bootstrap, Eeze comes as a minimal starting point for your app. I’ve only included the most common building blocks and base file structure that you might need to create a custom application. There are no base preset styles to work around, delete, or overwrite. Just clone the app and start writing *your* code in seconds.

Sr. UI Geek at Yammer

2010-2012: Front-end development (HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, Rails) on the Web Team.

Yammer is the original enterprise social network, providing a secure way for employees to communicate, collaborate, and share information.

During my tenure we overcame Salesforce to own the lion’s share of the social enterprise space with over 4 million users and networks in 85% of the Fortune 500, we expanded our featureset and level of finish in the product with Yammer 3, raised lots of funding, and tripled in size.

You can see my code all over Yammer’s web interface. In my year and five months there I fixed countless bugs, worked on dozens of A/B tests to perfect our sign-up process and new features, I coded the new header and nav for Yammer 3 (allows for custom background colors to which we need to respond with font colors and menus), and most recently helped build the new stats dashboard on the site today.

Perhaps even more pride inducing is the front-end talent that I interviewed, pitched, and helped bring on to Yammer. At one point I was *the* front-end enginner on their web team, but when I left we had 7 of the most intelligent and fun UI Engineers I have ever worked with!

“Wil’s pretty much the complete package: fantastic design skills, solid front-end engineer, absolute blast to work with, and a hilarious dog. He’s deeply missed at Yammer and remains firmly on my ‘work with again’ list.”

- Coda Hale, Infrastructure Architect at Yammer

User Interface for NodeConf SummerCamp

2011: Design, Artwork, Front-end development

NodeConf SummerCamp is an unconference for javascript geeks in the hills of Northern California. I quickly ran with the creative freedom this project provided me, whipping out my pen tablet and painting trees, a cave, and a wooden summer camp sign! The end product is a whimsical little one page website to promote the fun weekend retreat.

UX Contractor at Wikia

2010: Product design, front-end development (HTML, CSS, jQuery, PHP)

Wikia empowers more than 75,000 communities like Wookieepedia, WoW Wiki, and Lostpedia. They’re the largest user-generated media company and a top 100 web property. It can be a fun challenge because they're an extremely high-volume site which allows custom CSS/Javascript modifications by each wiki!

You can see my work in their hub pages (UI engineering) and the popular user achievements release (product consulting and UI engineering). They wanted a way for users to make customizable achievements for their wikis with a custom graphic. At the same time we needed a way to maintain some level of quality. So, I suggested we make several different frames (bronze, silver, and gold) and layer it over the user uploaded artwork. I brought in my friend Tom to draw up the frames and building it was a snap!

“Wil is a smart, creative designer. We worked on a complicated project with a lot of moving parts, and he came up with solutions and new ideas on the fly.”

- Danny Horn, Product Manager at Wikia

Creator of Powder Envy

2010: Concept, art direction, layout design, logo, end-to-end development (HTML, CSS, jQuery, PHP/MySQL)

Powder Envy is a project that I’ve had in my back pocket for a long time. One day the idea for the gondola visualization just hit me out of the blue. I sketched it up in my moleskine and emailed it to my pal, Tom. After that things started moving quickly. I suddenly found myself with this very striking center-piece, and that made everything that much more fun to make!

UI Contractor at ZangZing

2010: Product Consulting, Front-end development (HTML5, CSS, jQuery, Rails)

ZangZing is a photo sharing start-up based in the Presidio area of San Francisco which I worked on while it was still pre-launch. I spearheaded the front-end development of their alpha launch. It’s a challenging and UI-heavy application which made it fun.

Author, St.eeze Front-End Development Starter Kit

2010: Front-end development (HTML5, CSS, jQuery, Rails)

St.eeze is my personal front-end boilerplate updated for HTML5 and CSS3. In addition to being my first public github project it has also been a very useful one as a place to come when creating a new project. I then try and take what I’ve learned developing other sites back into the boilerplate.

UI Architect at Zivity

2009: Product conceptualization, design, engineering team coordination, front-end engineering, wire-framing, copy writing

In 2009 I became Zivity’s User Interface Architect. I immediately started work on a new home page design intended to overcome longstanding conversion issues, re-architecting the application flow, and fixing bugs. After 7 months of improvements we had doubled our 18 month-old subscriber base!

Lots of my work still exists on the production Zivity site, today. The home/sign-up pages are new, but when you do sign in to the actual site many of the application's views (Editor’s Picks, Photosets, User Profiles, etc.) remian mostly how I redesigned and developed them in 2009. On these views only the top nav has really changed, to match the logged out redesign.

“Wil Everts is a pleasure to work with. He’s got a passion for front-end design and and UI. I’ve seen him make some extremely beautiful pages in concert with other developers. It was a pleasure working with him, and I hope to work with him again someday.”

- Alex Choi, Ruby/Rails Senior Engineer at Zivity

Senior Engineer, Top Fans

2009: Front-end engineering for the launch team, unobtrusive + object oriented javascript, merb templating, iPhone CSS, flash video player.

Top Fans was fun because it was a chance for us to work on a brand new application and develop it right from the ground up. It was by far the best development team that Zivity had during the two years I worked there. In no time at all the site was conceptualized, developed, designed, and launched. Over the next few months we made countless improvements and fun-to-develop features like a posterous-style handler of video, audio, and images from blackberries, iphones, etc.

Sr. UI Engineer at Zivity

2008-2010: Front-end engineering, unobtrusive javascript, Ruby on Rails templating, jQuery

Working for Zivity was a charmed life for many reasons. Zivity was my first Rails development job and my first "mainstream" (Silicon Valley VC funded) start-up. My first day at Zivity Forbes was in the office. A couple days after Zivity was prominent at “the Crunchies,” two months later we were funded. And, all the while, I got to work with some really great people making some really cool stuff.