About me

I’m Jonathan Stegall. I am a web designer and emergent / emerging follower of Jesus currently living with my wife and daughter in Atlanta, seeking to abide in the creative tension between theology, spirituality, design, and justice.

In my day job, I am a Web Developer at Emory University (any views and opinions here are not necessarily those of my employer). This means that I, and my colleagues on the web design team, design and write code for the web, building things for departments and schools across the university.

When the right projects come along and the time allows, I enjoy doing freelance projects. You can find some of these in my portfolio. I have a passion for web standards and best practices in code, beautiful and user-driven design, and whitespace. I taught myself to program in PHP (WordPress, CodeIgniter, custom things) and Ruby on Rails to accomplish these designs.

I also have a passion for authentic spirituality in real, organic communities, as well as how this works itself out in postmodernism and on the edges of culture. I have varying degrees of involvement in Emergent Village, The Underground Railroad, and the Atlanta Emergent Cohort.

Many of the writings on this site relate to my passions for design, the emerging church, our emerging culture, bivcational ministry, and the seeking of justice in the world. There is a creative tension that I believe exists between these areas, and I hope to build this site, and continue to build my life, holistically inside that tension.

About this website

This website has served as my online identity since 2006 (it replaced various other personal sites, journals, and portfolios I previously maintained since 1997). In the past, this site was just a portfolio, and then just a blog. Now, it encompasses a variety of things, including a portfolio, a blog, and so on.

If you are curious about such technical things, this site is powered by WordPress, with a custom theme that I wrote from the ground up. It uses a few good plugins, including a couple that I wrote. I strive to make good use of accessible, semantic XHTML, including microformats, transcendent CSS, and jQuery. My individual posts do not validate, due to my use of the aria-required attribute, which is not yet valid but has accessibility benefits that outweigh this.

On this site, I do not support Internet Explorer 6 aside from ensuring that the content is accessible (for work and client projects, the extent to which I support it depends on the audience), but if you are using a modern browser and notice issues, do let me know.

As a blog, this site focuses on design and the web, and the authentic living out of faith and spirituality in emerging culture. Design is about life. So is faith. Please feel welcome to contribute to the thoughts here. I’d also love to encourage you to subscribe. There is a full feed, as well as a posts only feed and a daily links feed.