Jeff K. Ward is a professional web creative, entrepreneur and founder of "Animikii":http://www.animikii.com. He brings over a decade of graphic and web design experience to Animikii’s flagship products: "YikeSite":http://www.yikesite.com and "Apricado Music":http://www.apricado.com. Jeff’s lifelong passion for developing web-based applications was influenced by his early work helping create and lead a number of online education solutions companies. While in high school Jeff was hired by online education company Oz New Media as a web design consultant, inspiring the creation of his first company "Meta Media":http://static.animikii.com/meta/. He went on to lead his own team before specializing in graphical user interface design with several start-up companies in California’s Silicon Valley. Jeff’s goal was to engage, entertain and inspire students with new and emerging web technologies. While working at educational multimedia companies in the United States and Canada Jeff excelled at coordinating the efforts of large production teams to develop web-based learning materials. His ability to manage geographically dispersed web development teams has earned Jeff a reputation as an effective project manager and product lead for web-based initiatives. In 2003, Jeff founded "Animikii Inc.":http://www.animikii.com, a web-services company building web-applications and user experiences for clients. In 2007, Jeff was "interviewed on the Web 2.0 Show":http://web20show.com/episodes/episode-36-yikesite for his first publicly launched product, YikeSite. He was also interviewed on the "Ruby on Rails Podcast":http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/railsconf-portland-2008-apricado-new-relic-phusion to talk about Apricado which subsequently "got some attention":http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/apricado-selling-your-music-has-never-been-this-easy/ on the popular technology blog TechCrunch. <div class='floatleft webapp'> <a href="http://www.yikesite.com/" target="_blank" class="noborder"><img border="0" src="http://www.animikii.com/files/animikii/yikesite.png" alt="YikeSite"/></a> YikeSite was developed for Animikii's own clients until Jeff turned the product into a hosted service by making it available to any web designer who was looking for a better CMS that can be branded and offered as their own. </div> <div class='floatleft webapp'> <a href="http://www.apricado.com/" target="_blank" class="noborder"><img border="0" src="http://www.animikii.com/files/animikii/apricado.png" alt="Apricado"/></a> In 2008, Jeff led the "creation":http://jeff.io/posts/user-interface-wireframes of Apricado Music. An independent musician himself, Jeff knows how hard it can be to sell music online. His team designed and built a service for independent musicians to easily sell their music online. </div><div class="clear"> </div> Jeff is "Ojibway":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibway / "Métis":http://snipr.com/metispeople and is a proud and active member of the Aboriginal community. Jeff regularly speaks at conferences and workshops on topics from Youth Entrepreneurship and Economic Development to Computer Programming and Internet Development. Jeff has a deep understanding of Aboriginal cultures from across North America. As role model, leader and former "native hoop dancer":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_Hoop_Dance, Jeff believes in a strong digital culture for Canada’s First Peoples and has contributed to many community-building efforts. Jeff’s Aboriginal heritage informs not only his creative work but his business philosophy as well. Jeff lives, works and plays on "Vancouver Island":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver_Island with his wife and two sons. h2. I Asked These People To Say Nice Stuff About Me _"Jeff is one of those rare, edge-cases that can not only create great designs but follow through end-to-end, from idea to execution. We absolutely loved working with him and hope to do it again soon."_ *&mdash; Andrew Wilkinson, Creative Director, "MetaLab":http://www.metalabdesign.com* _"Working with you was awesome. Your tenured experience with consumer web was most helpful when going through the high level function, interface and design of LandingPages. You understand how people interact with web applications and more importantly how to streamline the user experience. Your knowledge of both design AND development is a major asset."_ *&mdash; Ethan Bloch, Co-Founder, CEO, "Flowtown":http://www.flowtown.com* _"Jeff has been an invaluable partner for Northern Village, in helping launch Village CMS, a software service based on YikeSite. He is very responsive to any difficulties, and is open to listening for ways in which the software could be improved. I very much look forward to working with Jeff for a long time to come."_ *&mdash; Arni Mikelsons, "Northern Village & Village CMS":http://www.northernvillage.com* _"Jeff was a pleasure to work with. He hired us as designers for a project that had some challenges associated with it. He did an impeccable job shielding us from the complexities that did not have direct relevance to our role in the project. This made providing design management on my end a snap and helped us do what was best for the project. Would look forward to the opportunity to work with Jeff again!"_ *&mdash; Gagan Diesh, CEO, "DesignStamp":http://www.designstamp.com* 2009-02-09T07:52:30Z 1 about 2009-10-21T18:15:33Z