Traversal - Web Design / Development

I am Travis Hensgen, a web developer living in the city of Adelaide in South Australia. I grew up near the small city of Mildura in regional Victoria, where in high school I was more likely to be messing about with an Apple IIe in the computer room than out on the oval running around* or kicking a football, which probably explains a lot now. While a lot of the skills I use now were learnt on the job, I did get a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science about a decade ago at the Univeristy of Adelaide (when Netscape Communicator 4.7 was the crème de la crème), so maybe I actually do know what I’m doing…

After university, I had a brief stint as a Windows forms developer at the Adelaide Convention Centre which was a great opportunity to learn how to build GUIs for applications that people use every day, and under the same roof. This role was also a great chance to mess about with SQL databases that weren’t called “Northwind”, a skill that is still very handy today. This feels like a very long time ago now, indeed it’s right about the same time Internet Explorer 6 was released… hmmmmm.

Next up I moved to the slightly busier city of Sydney (well, was dragged there by my now-wife Jemma) where I was lucky enough to start out working as a developer with Ben and the team at the very talented Red Ant Design. This was where I:

• learned how to build pixel-perfect layouts in HTML 4 with tables
• unlearned how to build pixel-perfect layouts in HTML 4 with tables
• learned to build pixel-perfect layouts with XHTML and CSS
• wrote a lot of if(document.all){...} statements in JavaScript (before the sweet JavaScript libraries we have today came along)
• built sites and tools for some very well known companies
• …and worked on a great CMS called Workbench using ASP 3.0 and SQL 2000

I then worked with the ever passionate Tony Redhead and the team at Red Square Productions (now a part of Webqem), which showed me how another Sydney web studio does it, and does it very well. I’ll never forget not wanting to say “no” to building a template design full of transparent PNGs with links layered on top in my first week there! I'm sure a few web developers out there know why that’s amusing…

Now I’m back in Adelaide working from home (with about 3 times the floor space), surrounded by lots of screens, Macs, PCs, and a couple of very cute animals. In that time I’ve suddenly become the go-to-guy for some great clients, worked more in the previously-elusive design phases of projects, learnt a whole lot more about JavaScript, dabbled in Rails and MVC, and created an identity in this very web site. And so it continues…

* these days I’m hooked on clocking up kilometres on Nike+, something I never imagined I was capable of in the computer room at high school.

The Traversal Name

It surely comes as no surprise that the name Traversal is closely tied to my given name Travis. The name Travis is a variant of the Old French name Travers which means "to cross over". (Less cool is the fact that the name was given to toll collectors, not the people actually crossing over – perhaps I'm in the wrong industry?)

The English word Traversal is both verb and noun, as stated in the Oxford Dictonary:

• verb: 1 travel or extend across or through. 2 move back and forth or sideways.
• noun: 1 an act of traversing. 2 a part of a structure that extends or is fixed across something.

All of these definitions fit very neatly with the idea of the web, where each of us constantly traverse between and within the web sites we visit every day – indeed, it's really what defines the web. (Even more handily, the domain name was still available too!).

The Traversal Logo

The Traversal logo depicts a shape reminiscent of a bird traversing through the air. The bird leaves a trail of dots behind colored in red, green, and blue; as you may be aware, very small dots of red, green, and blue make up every single colored pixel that you see on your screen. These colored dots in the logo, then, represent that the majority of the work I do is intended for the screen.

The bird shape has another meaning though – it is a modification of the curly bracket character which is an essential token in many of the programming languages we use to build web sites today. So, the logo also depicts the idea of code leaving behind a trail of colored pixels, which is an abstract take on the way the web sites are actually built and rendered (okay sure, I admit that sounds a little bit fairy-tale-ish…).

Enough about Traversal, how on Earth is your surname Hensgen pronounced?

This is a question that even I'm not 100% sure of the answer to – my family and I have always pronounced it phonetically as Hen-shen (as if it was spelt more like Hension). I recently learned, however, that the correct pronunciation may in fact be Hens-gen which is definitely how most people try to pronounce it. Either of these is good for me!

Like most things in life, there’s more than one way to create a web site.
Here are the 4 major phases of my work process, based on industry standards and best practice: