Basalt, Colorado

Virginia P. PaysonWebsites and applications, designed and built

Independent designer and developer, working in the Roaring Fork Valley since 2002. I build sites your own staff can run, and connect them to the systems your office already depends on.

24 years in this valley 50+ custom WordPress builds The design and the backend Some of it in daily use

Recent work — all of it live

The hauler's dispatch board: drivers, progress and incidents for the day's routes
Office system · in daily use

A local hauler's whole office, connected

The company ran its routes off a printed spreadsheet. Now drivers work from their phones, the office watches the day arrive on a dispatch board, and it all reads the same sheet they already kept. Nobody had to learn a new system.

It keeps working through the valley's dead zones, and a direct connection to their QuickBooks, built to Intuit's security requirements, is in final testing: every change is previewed, approved by a person, and logged.

Node · WebSockets · Google Sheets API · QuickBooks API · Twilio
Early Music San Antonio volunteer tools: an event awaiting approval, with Approve and publish
Nonprofit · events calendar

An events calendar the volunteers run themselves

The public submits a concert, a volunteer clicks approve, and the calendar and archive rebuild on their own. 419 events came across from WordPress and a costly licensed plugin, with nothing lost.

A plain-language guide explains every field, so the site survives the next change of volunteers.

Static site · Node admin · email notices · no plugin licences
Marissa King, private chef: home page with line-drawn kitchen illustration
Small business · design

A private chef's site that looks like her work

Private dinners and event catering across the valley. The brief was that it should look considered and hold up beside the food, never like a template.

She updates her own menus and calendar, and customers sign up for Meals To Go and pay online.

Google Sans Flex · OKLCH colour · golden-ratio layout · no framework
Carolynn Heil Interiors: the site colour settings page
Client-run · no code

A studio that re-tones its own site

An Aspen interiors studio picks one base colour and every page follows, with contrast checked as it goes. No code and no call to me. Try it: changes save only in your own browser.

Vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript · OKLCH · seven harmony schemes

Clients — longer-running projects

Trail Runner and Rock and Ice

Outdoor magazines · sole webmaster

Built and ran both magazines' online editions and every digital advertising campaign, including the interactive ads, when online brought in more than half of the company's revenue. Moved both sites from an Adobe platform and Joomla to WordPress.

Aspen Ideas Festival

Aspen Institute · Visit →

Custom pages and feed integrations behind a multi-track event platform — podcast and video feeds parsed into the CMS, schedule pulled from the internal database, plus the newsletters and the Festival app.

Carolynn Heil Interiors

Aspen

A complete studio site in vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript, laid out on golden-ratio proportions with an OKLCH colour system — and a control panel built into it so the studio can re-tone the whole site itself.

The Home Ranch

Clark, Colorado · Visit →

A 3,000-acre Colorado guest ranch — lodging, dining, experiences and private events for a property that has to sell a place, not just describe one.

Fripp Island Golf & Beach Resort

Destination · Visit →

A private-island resort: 100+ rental properties, ten restaurants, two golf courses and a full reservation engine. Lodging, dining, recreation and events served from one site.

Cracks & Racks

Aspen · Visit →

Full store migration off end-of-life Magento 1 onto Magento 2, with the storefront rebuilt rather than ported — catalog, appointment scheduling and service content in one usable whole.

The lab — tools I built because I wanted them

How I work

HTML and CSS first

Structure and styling in markup, with JavaScript where it adds behaviour. Lighter pages tend to stay quick, and tend to stay easier to change a few years on.

Accessible from the start

WCAG 2.1 AA considered at the design stage rather than patched on at the end: contrast, keyboard support, screen-reader testing. Not an accessibility overlay — they tend to cause more than they fix.

Built to hand over

No proprietary framework, no page-builder lock-in. You own the code, the accounts and the documentation — so you are never stuck with any one developer, including me.

Have a project in the valley?

Happy to talk it through — no pitch, no obligation.