What is Quercus Ilicifolia?
Quercus Ilicifolia is the blog/gallery website for Sean Q. Hendricks, the communications manager for the Graduate School at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
He created Quercus Ilicifolia to showcase some of his web work, as well as his interests in hiking and photography. The name Quercus Ilicifolia was decided on because it is the scientific name of the Bear Oak. The intersection of the natural world, the bear, language, and the letter "Q" together create a whole that is particularly significant.
Current Work
Sean believes in making sites as accessible, usable, and responsive as possible. He follows recommendations from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from the World Wide Web Consortium to ensure that his sites are usable by individuals with a variety of disabilities, such as visual, audial, cognitive, and physical. Using the concepts of responsive design, Sean works to ensure that his sites are usable on a variety of devices, with a variety of screen resolutions.
The content management system Drupal has become a rich, robust framework for creating content-driven websites, and Sean has been using Drupal for over two years, and he has been using it consistently to manage sites that has developed on his own and with the various teams with which he has worked. He has developed custom theme functions and custom modules for Drupal that have been incorporated into these sites.
In recent years, Wordpress has been added to his repertoire, where he has been involved in site administration, as well as custom theme and plugin development.
Background
Sean has been an artist and computer aficianado for decades. He first began programming computers at around 11 years old, and computers have been a part of his life ever since. His artistic endeavors have primarily centered around pen-and-ink, pencil, and Prismacolor, and he still enjoys creating new work both inside and outside of his job at the University. Some of his artistic creations involve one of his other interests: language. He not only creates language-inspired work, but has built languages of his own.
Sean received his undergraduate degree in Linguistics at the University of Georgia, and then went on to graduate school at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1999. Since then, his career has moved in unexpected directions, leading him back into the computer field, and into web design and development. This is not a new field for him, by any stretch, since he was creating websites as far back as the early 90's, when the concept of the World Wide Web was just starting to take hold, and he continued to work in the HTML medium throughout his graduate and post-graduate career.