Nico Killips

Front End Web Developer | Digital Consultant

Hi! I'm Nico.

I build simple and effective websites.

I'm a Michigan-based web developer and digital designer with over 10 years of agency experience. I love helping brands build thoughtful, simple, and effective websites and other digital products.

Download my Resumé

Featured Work

Yoruba Saxon

I had the pleasure of working with Tyke Brand Studio on the redesign of Yoruba Saxon, the film production company led by A-list power-couple David and Jessica Oyelowo.

Requirements

The small but mighty team at Yoruba Saxon needed a platform that could support the tailored design and provide an editing experience that felt familiar and had a gentle learning curve.

The team wanted to align the launch of the new site with the release of a series called Government Cheese.

Solutions

Familiarity and ease of use was achieved by leveraging WordPress with only a handful of plugins to simplify the content management and administrative experiences.

Visit Yoruba Saxon

Features

  • Custom WordPress Theme
  • Visually optimized for large desktops, tablets, and mobile devices
  • WCAG-compliant keyboard accessible navigation
  • ACF Pro customized editing experience
  • Stripped down WordPress backend to reduce visual clutter
  • Angled containers that flow content along their boundaries

Recent Work

Shutout the Stigma

BlueKC's partnership and joint initiative with the Kansas City Royals aims to normalize and raise awareness of young athletes experiencing mental health challenges. I was tasked with updating this static site with a new design within a short timeframe to align with television marketing campaigns. It uses a simple HTML/CSS/JS (ES6 and jQuery) stack along with node packages to help with pre-compiling and bundling.

Visit Site

The Blueprint - BlueKC

During my time at Chemistry, I was in charge of managing several items of BlueKC's catalogue. One of the largest, most challenging sites was The Blueprint. It serves as a resource hub that populates unique content for targeted audiences, determined by the user's entry point (via referrer logic). We used WordPress to enable their marketing team to author and manage content.

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Brands

Over several years, I've had the pleasure of contributing agency work for some great brands.

Disciplines

As a former designer, I gravitate toward frontend-focused disciplines, but throughout my career I found myself responding to various business needs and finding ways to add value.

While I specialize in building websites, I also have deep experience building different types of products such as eNewsletters, CRM integrations, banner ads, and social media campaigns.

Experiments

I've learned a lot over my career, but I'm always learning something new. I enjoy creating sandboxes for new technologies and documenting my findings on my blog over at Hashnode.

Learn More on my Blog

Languages / Frameworks

  • Bootstrap
  • ES5, ES6, jQuery
  • Foundation
  • HTML/CSS/JS
  • Next.js
  • PHP
  • Skeleton
  • Tailwind
  • Wordpress Theme Development

Tools

  • Adobe Creative Suite
  • Browserstack
  • Figma
  • Github / Git
  • Google Analytics
  • Gulp
  • JetBrains IDEs
  • Node.js / NPM
  • SASS, LESS, HAML

Practices

  • Analytics
  • CI/CD Pipelines
  • Cross-browser testing
  • Graceful Degradation
  • Performance and Optimization
  • Progressive Enhancement
  • Responsive Design
  • SEO feature implementations
  • WCAG and ADA Compliance

About

My childhood happy place looked something like this: hunkered down in a folding chair staring at a CRT monitor with C:\ looking back at me. The hum and squeals of a self-installed PCI 28.8K dial-up modem kicking off a session of AOL Instant Messenger chatting and endless possibilities. Fast-forward to today; that sense of wonder evoked by the www remains and I harness it to help agencies and small businesses solve problems in the digital space.

The pull to command prompts and digital connectivity would lead me to building websites from scratch with HTML/CSS/JS, and eventually to formal front end web development.

Performing Arts

Growing up with a family of musicians and performing artists led to discovering my love for drumming, piano, and music theory at around fifteen years old. After studying my craft for a few years, I found myself touring the country with different bands as a drummer and sharing the stage with many of my musical heroes.

Life on the road taught me how to stay calm in a crisis, communicate effectively, and learn new skills quickly.

Contact

I'm always looking for new opportunities to work with great people. If you're interested in working with me, please send me a message.