BaseballConnect

Bio

Hi! I’m Jon, I build accessible websites and web apps for the big ‘26. Most days that’s client work at Strausberg Group; after hours, I work on projects for freelance clients. When I’m not programming, my local haunts are my kitchen and my local AMC.

I build websites, but the part I care about most is what happens after they launch. The CMS should make sense to the people updating it. The frontend should hold up on a phone. And nobody should need a developer for every small change.

I’ve been at Strausberg Group since 2018, working across the whole messy span of client web work: early planning, design review, custom WordPress and PHP, headless builds, hosting, accessibility, launch, and maintenance. I like the technical decisions, but I also like explaining them. A good call with a client can save more time than a clever piece of code.

I started on the marketing side, and it still shows. I think about the words, the search result, the analytics, and the person who has to find something - not only whether the implementation is tidy. At FreightPOP, that mix led me from writing and SEO into rebuilding the site itself. Traffic doubled within six months, which settled the question of which direction I wanted to go.

Outside agency work, I take on freelance work and build things of my own.

Professional experience

Jul 2018 — present

Web Developer

Strausberg Group

Representative stack Astro · WordPress · PHP · JavaScript · Cloudflare · ACF · GA4 · Figma

I take client sites from early planning through launch and whatever comes after — 25+ builds across hospitality, destination marketing, and corporate clients

Rebuilt Downtown Burbank as a headless WordPress and Astro site on Cloudflare, including its CMS, content migration, search, mobile design, accessibility work, and launch

Built a separate Astro site for Downtown Burbank's FIFA World Cup fan zone so a projected 10x traffic spike never touched the client's WordPress hosting; the event sold out

Design and build custom content architectures for every client CMS — post types, taxonomies, ACF field groups, and modular blocks shaped to each organization's editorial workflow (Visit MDR, Downtown Burbank, and corporate clients across several verticals)

Build and consume RESTful APIs across the portfolio — custom Google Maps integrations for destination sites, cross-domain analytics bridges for booking-engine subdomains, and email platform integrations with Brevo and Instantly

Own deployment and DNS operations for nearly every engagement — server provisioning, domain migrations to Cloudflare, SSL, and email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) — writing runbooks when handing DNS changes to client IT teams

Scoped and delivered a dedicated outbound email infrastructure for Fast Forward Group, taking them from a DMARC-none setup to a fully authenticated, warmed-up sending environment with handoff documentation

Manage GA4, Tag Manager, and event tracking for all web clients, including ecommerce reporting and conversion funnels, and turn the findings into website roadmaps non-technical stakeholders can act on

Led the agency's migration from Photoshop to Figma — trained the design team on auto-layout, components, and mobile-first workflows, and run ongoing sessions on UI trends and accessibility

Serve as primary technical liaison with external development partners, triaging feature requests and deciding what's built in-house versus outsourced

Built the agency's WordPress starter theme — ACF, custom post types, Composer, Blade templating via Sage, and a Gulp build pipeline — replacing page-builder dependency and speeding up every launch since

Wrote the agency's WCAG 2.2 AA pre-launch checklist and trained designers and developers on it; new sites consistently ship with 90+ Lighthouse scores

Full-stack development and troubleshooting across the portfolio — theme and plugin builds, WP Engine and DigitalOcean deployments, DNS moves, and performance tuning (object caching, image optimization, CDN configuration)

Delivered ongoing CMS support and training for non-technical content editors across all active accounts, with user guides and documentation for each project

Work directly with clients on scope, tradeoffs, training, and the small decisions that tend to decide whether a site is actually useful

Ongoing

Freelance Web Developer

Independent clients

Representative stack Astro · Sanity · Cloudflare Pages · WordPress

Designed and built a marketing site for Lot 05, a West LA architectural design firm — design, development, QA, a custom Sanity CMS so the firm manages its own portfolio, Cloudflare Pages hosting, and launch, with SEO work continuing post-launch

Worked structured SEO content and markup into Lot 05's image-first design that visually wants to say almost nothing

Handle the full engagement solo on every freelance project — scoping, design, build, hosting, DNS, and client training, with no agency behind me

Nov 2020 — May 2026

Founding Developer

BaseballConnect

Representative stack WordPress · PHP · MemberPress · Stripe · OpenAI API · Brevo

Owned all design and technical work for a platform with paying members from its 2022 launch through 2026 — WordPress theme, architecture, hosting, and every custom feature

Configured a three-tier MemberPress membership and e-commerce stack with Stripe — paid courses, gated video content, and content gating at the post, feature, and navigation level — synced to Brevo via lifecycle hooks for automated email workflows

Wrote a custom job-scraper plugin covering 30 MLB teams across TeamWorkOnline, Greenhouse, and Lever — nightly staggered cron runs, deduplication, and automatic delisting when postings closed

Built an email notification plugin sending subscribers digests of new jobs for their favorite teams, with preference management via AJAX

Integrated the OpenAI API through a custom PHP client — file upload, polling, fallback handling — to power an AI resume reviewer that analyzes a member's resume against the job they're chasing

Jul 2017 — May 2018

Marketing Coordinator

FreightPOP

Representative stack HTML · CSS · JavaScript · Google Analytics

Rebuilt the company website with modular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript components

Improved the site's structure, speed, internal linking, metadata, and content; traffic doubled within six months of launch

Tested calls to action and the contact flow, helping lift free-trial conversions by 40% over six months

Stood up the analytics infrastructure and kept a daily dashboard current so leadership had real-time visibility into marketing performance

Earlier

Student Marketing Consultant · 9 Dots Community Learning Center Feb 2017 — May 2017

Things I've Built

Fanzone

2026 live

Role Sole developer — planning, build, hosting, launch, maintenance

Client Downtown Burbank PBID, at The Strausberg Group

Stack AstroCloudflareCanvas

fanzone.dtnbur.com ↗ Jul 18–19, 2026 · sold out
20k → 250k visitors · 82% mobile

The ticketing landing page for Downtown Burbank's FIFA World Cup 26 fan zone. A standalone Astro microsite on Cloudflare, built to absorb a 10× traffic spike without touching the client's WordPress hosting. The event sold out.

The dot field, four ways real section constants · click to spawn a pulse

Downtown Burbank hosted an official FIFA World Cup 26 fan zone on final weekend, July 18–19, 2026. The event needed a page that explained what was happening, showed everything downtown had going on, and got people buying tickets and parking. I built it at The Strausberg Group for the Downtown Burbank PBID: the landing page at fanzone.dtnbur.com, plus an info page covering parking, FAQs, and terms.

The main decision came before any code. We expected traffic to jump from about 20k visitors a month to 250k over a couple of weeks, and dtnbur.com runs on a WP Engine plan sized for a tenth of that, with no git workflow behind it. Building the fan zone inside WordPress would have been slow to work on and expensive to serve, so I built it as a static Astro site on Cloudflare under its own subdomain, recreating the main site's header and footer exactly so moving between the two domains didn't feel like leaving the site.

The site itself mobile viewport · loads on request

fanzone.dtnbur.com · 390 × 420 nothing third-party loads until you ask

I handled all the technical work: early planning meetings, ADA review of the designs, the mobile layout (the Figma was desktop-only), hosting and DNS, SEO, and three months of near-constant small changes between launch and event weekend — working with our PM and often directly with the client. Later sections, including the info page, I designed as well as built.

The animated dots in the hero are drawn on a canvas rather than exported as images, so they load instantly and stay crisp; the versions in the ads were blurry PNGs. The whole site passed ADA review top to bottom, which wasn't true of the other fan zone sites. And while every design review happened on a desktop screen, I built it mobile-first — 82% of visitors came on phones.

The countdown, replayed real flaps, real math · it hit zero July 18

Months

Days

Hours

The only breakpoint

/* the Figma was desktop-only;
   82% of visitors were not */
@media (max-width: 960px) {
  .hero__inner {
    flex-direction: column;
    text-align: center;
  }
  .hero__dates { font-size: 28px; }
  .hero__cta { padding: .875rem 2rem; }
}

The event sold out. I can't say the landing page was the reason, but it didn't hurt.

Downtown Burbank

2026 live dtnbur.com ↗

Role Sole developer — planning, headless architecture, CMS design, build, launch, maintenance

Stack AstroWordPress (headless)CloudflarePagefind

Launched July 13, 2026
near-perfect Lighthouse

A redesign and headless rebuild of dtnbur.com, Downtown Burbank's main site. Vibrant new design on the front, Astro on Cloudflare underneath, WordPress kept only as the editing backend — faster and more accessible than the old site ever was, with the plugin bloat gone.

Downtown Burbank's main site does a lot of jobs at once: it gives the district's businesses a digital presence, gives brokers a current picture of what doing business there looks like, and gives visitors everything from events to hotels. In 2026 we redesigned all of it — a vibrant new skin across the archives and place pages, and full redesigns of the key landing pages. Design started over the winter, development in late April, and the site launched July 13.

Under the redesign is a bigger change: I moved the frontend off WordPress entirely, rebuilding it as a headless Astro site on Cloudflare that pulls from the WordPress REST API. WordPress stays as the editing backend, but I rebuilt the CMS around how the district's admins actually work, and cut nearly all the functionality the old site handled cheaply through plugins.

As on the fan zone, I handled the technical side end to end: planning, design review, all development, the mobile design, QA, SEO and ADA work, migrating the data out of the old site, launch, and maintenance since.

The performance numbers are the easy thing to point at — near-perfect Lighthouse scores, even with a large video hero. But getting a headless site fast is straightforward these days. The harder work was the soft decisions: designing a CMS that makes sense for a site with this many moving parts, and getting the user flow right on the front.

My favorite piece is the site-wide search. Building the index meant deciding what a query should actually surface — if someone types "bars," do they want the nightlife blog post, the places tagged nightlife, or both, and in what order? I ended up collapsing the internal content types into the categories people actually think in — places, events, articles — and reserving jump-to-section results for the long-form pages where they're genuinely useful.

Specimens

Live search canned index · try "coffee", "music", or "cofee"

Suggestions

See all 6 results on dtnbur.com

What's New

Event Live on San Fernando Fri–Sat · free

Guide A weekend in Burbank Itinerary

New Now open: Barrel & Bean Place

↑↓ navigate ↵ open esc close

The site itself loads on request

dtnbur.com nothing third-party loads until you ask

Lot 05

2026 live lot05.com ↗

Role Freelance — design, build, Sanity CMS, hosting, launch, ongoing SEO

Stack AstroSanityCloudflare Pages

Launched Late July 2026
SEO through year end

A marketing site for Lot 05, a West LA architectural design firm — built freelance, direct with the client. Design, development, hosting, and a custom Sanity CMS, all mine: an image-first site that stays quiet visually while still giving search engines something to read.

Lot 05 is an architectural design firm in West LA — fairly new, with impressive built work and no website. I built them one, freelance and direct with the client: a marketing site whose whole job is to let the projects speak, alongside short blurbs on the firm's approach to design and to modern architectural challenges. It launched in late July 2026, and I'm continuing SEO work through the end of the year.

I designed and built the entire thing — development, hosting on Cloudflare Pages, QA, launch — plus a custom CMS in Sanity so the firm can manage their projects themselves. A designer came in near the end to polish the final elements with new fonts and some small motifs; the mobile design was mine throughout.

The hard part was a tension. The client wanted less and less on every page, trusting the images to speak for themselves — and search engines need actual words. As the design got quieter with each round, I had to find increasingly clever ways to work SEO content and markup into a site that visually wants to say almost nothing.

The result is a really buttoned-up site for a firm this small, and it loads fast.

Specimens

Gallery with a spine ported from work/[slug].astro · cliffside, 5 of 12 rows

Cliffside Point Dume, Malibu

Ocean living room with suspended fireplace

Two readers, one page

Cliffside — pergola and garden above the Pacific at Point Dume

Cliffside Point Dume, Malibu

A few words and an image. Everything the client wanted on the page.

<article itemtype="CreativeWork">
  <h2 itemprop="name">Cliffside</h2>
  <img alt="Pergola over the
       ocean bluff">
  <dl hidden>
    <dt>Typology</dt>
    <dd>Residence</dd>
    <dt>Location</dt>
    <dd>Point Dume, Malibu</dd>
  </dl>
</article>

Same page. The words live in alt text, a visually-hidden definition list, and schema.org properties — read by crawlers and screen readers, invisible to the eye.

The site itself loads on request

lot05.com nothing third-party loads until you ask

2020–2026

Role Everything but the content — design, architecture, custom plugins, AI integration, e-commerce

Stack WordPressPHPMemberPressOpenAI APIBrevo

Launched 2022 · closed May 2026
30 MLB teams · 5 platforms
nothing left to visit

A baseball-careers site I built with two partners over four years: educational videos, a paid course, a job board fed by a custom scraper watching 30 MLB teams' hiring pages, and an AI resume reviewer. Launched in 2022; shut down in May 2026.

BaseballConnect started in late 2020 as founders Mike and Dan's idea: a community for people who wanted to work in baseball. We launched in early 2022 with around 90 educational videos, morphing over time to include a paid course, a job board for baseball-operations roles with a notification system, and an AI resume reviewer.

Mike and Dan made the content, I handled all design and technical work, the WordPress theme, the MemberPress membership and e-commerce layer, and the custom development and plugins that made the site interesting.

The member funnel four steps of the real journey

Analyst, Baseball Research & Development Los Angeles Dodgers May 2 View

Baseball Systems Developer Cleveland Guardians May 1 View

Coordinator, Player Development San Diego Padres Apr. 29 View

Assistant, Amateur Scouting San Francisco Giants Apr. 28 View

Associate, Baseball Operations New York Yankees Apr. 26 View

The job board ran on a scraper I wrote as a WordPress plugin: 30 MLB teams across several hiring platforms — TeamWorkOnline, Greenhouse, Lever. It scraped nightly on staggered schedules, deduplicated, and delisted automatically when postings closed. A second plugin mailed subscribers digests of new jobs for their favorite teams. And the resume reviewer sent a member's resume and the job they were chasing to GPT-4o API. The biggest technical challenge was scraper timing, our host capped PHP execution at 60 seconds. One nightly run would fail, so each team got its own staggered cron slot instead. We went back and forth over whether or not to switch hosts, but decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze and felt that there were bigger concerns with long term maintenance somewhere else.

The job analysis AI resume review · captured from the final build

A job listing — Baseball Operations, Entry Level Opportunities, Toronto Blue Jays — with its Job Actions sidebar; the AI-powered Resume Review button is where the process starts

The nightly schedule real team map · minute = (abs(crc32(slug)) % 30) × 2

Team

Platform

Cron

toronto-blue-jays

teamworkonline