About

Mission Statement

Arachne Web Development promotes artists and designers within the University of Maryland’s student community. Its main goals are inspiring creativity, sharing web resources, and ultimately giving student artists the confidence to share their work with the world.

Who We Are

Arachne Web Development is an online HTML5 resource for artistic students to create, customize, and publish personal portfolios on the Internet.

This website was made by a team of web authoring students at the Univeristy of Maryland to serve local needs. We hope you enjoy “weaving your identity” as much as we have enjoyed spinning out this website!

Our Project’s Creation

Our team believes in “Weaving artists’ and designers’ identities and designs.” With this goal, Arachne Web Development provides you with the tools you need to show who you are as a professional and designer.

Explore this site for possibilities.

Join the Twitter conversation! #ArachneWeb

The Origin of Our Name

The inspiration for the web development project comes from mythology, but it holds modern day appeal to an artistic audience. Arachne was a mortal peasant woman who was the best weaver in the world. Her boastfulness caused the goddess of weaving, Minerva (or Athena), to challenge her to a weaving contest. Arachne technically won—her tapestry was the best. Yet, it is not wise to beat a goddess.

In a jealous rage, Minerva struck her. Then, Minerva transformed Arachne into a spider as a lifelong punishment for her pride. Arachne’s story provided a message to artists. She produced great art, though at great sacrifice. Young artists can relate to the story, given the modern day challenges to produce beautiful artwork and make a living off of that artistic passion.

Paolo Veronese's Arachne

Team Biographies

Shannon Goff

Shannon Goff is an English and Communications Double Major with an internship in Marketing. She focuses on using social media, reaching out to people, and marketing a specific brand or business. She also heads a blog team and so performs a fair amount of editing, publishing, and writing. Shannon excels at spreading the word and navigating websites, but hopes to improve her skills at creating websites during the development of Arachne.

Avery Graham

Avery Graham has taken a few web design classes that covered HTML, PHP, CSS, and Java. Using this knowledge Avery has worked on a number of fully functionally websites. Over the past year he has also done some freelance work for different clients. Although he is extremely capable of working with these different codes his strengths lean more toward design than anything. Extremely familiar with all of Adobe products and Final Cut Pro. With this knowledge Avery has made some pretty flashy videos, websites, logos, and all sorts of cool designs.

Lara Lee

Organized, detail-oriented, and self-motivated, Lara Lee had little experience with HTML and CSS coding, but since taking a Web Authoring course at college, she has quickly learned the basics. She also has prior experience in desktop publishing and graphic design while working at the Rottman Creative Group as an assistant. In her spare time, Lara has further practiced design, copywriting, film and digital photography, and a branding campaign for a local organization, The Classics Club.

Jenae Ramos

Jenae is a Psychology major with a Rhetoric minor, who also has graphic design experience. With a love for design, Jenae uses Adobe programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and InDesign daily. As the communications student assistant at the University of Maryland Office of Sustainability, she frequently updates the website and is comfortable with HTML. In addition, she also has significant experience in promoting organizations through social media. She can assist with content creation, brand identity, and navigation as well as ensuring all details are in order.

Tony Rogers

Tony loves the web, and an enthusiastic practitioner of web standards. He loves to dabble in programming languages as well. Improving technical documentation is an obsession for him. He has worked to improve the documentation for many open source projects in pursuit of his ideals.