Who Designed the Coop's Website?
Meet Karen Millard
This website was designed and built by Karen Millard, a Coop founding board member and the organization’s long-time expert in all things Web.
Karen is a full-time Saskatoon freelance writer. Her features, profiles and service pieces have appeared in national and regional print publications in Canada and the United States. She has been a contributor to Herstory: The Canadian Women’s Calendar since 2002, as writer and website administrator.
As a copywriter, Karen produces a wide range of documents for organizations in the public and private sectors. She has ghostwritten a book on leadership development, and her articles have appeared in academic, industry and trade association newsletters both under her own by-line and on behalf of her clients. As a technical writer, Karen has authored three software User’s Guides, including one for a program in use by the Indy 500 and Las Vegas' Bellagio Hotel and Casino.
Karen always has a number of creative writing and website development projects simmering on the back burner. In addition to her career as a writer, however, Karen's growing expertise in Web design warrants a special note in the present context.
Despite the temptations offered by MS FrontPage, Karen has avoided using that program's code-heavy frame-based format in her current design. Her growing facility with XHTML has allowed her instead to build her own more streamlined template through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). An admirer of the objectives of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in standardizing and simplifying Web design, Karen believes that the future of design lies in cleaner, more streamlined code, producing websites that are more adaptable, more browser-compatible, faster to load, less hoggish of valuable bandwidth, and more search-engine friendly.
Several years ago Karen designed and built the original Coop website, so it is fitting that she should be the one to create its replacement, in a next-generation form modern and flexible enough to grow with the Coop’s changing needs. She has also designed and built websites for her own business, as well as a site for The Saskatoon Women’s Calendar Collective.
The new Coop site is Karen’s first venture working from scratch without a commercial template. As a result, she now owns a copyrighted template of her own design that she can use, sell, or modify for future projects.
Karen’s work has saved the Coop potentially thousands of dollars in commercial design costs. We greatly appreciate her dedication and commitment in seeing this project through to completion before stepping down from the board to pursue her business activities full time.
