Web Design

Web as the ultimate communication platform

In the early days of the web, it was called a superhighway. Now it's a lot more than something you travel on to get from one old thing to another. It's a city, a world, an ecosystem, a brain. It's where your ideas live and get bumped into new shapes. It's where the complexities of your personality get exposed, washed, dirtied, and redressed. The web is where you hang your hat, visit your friends, confront your enemies, do your work, and rest from your work. It's comforting and it's scary, endless and yet still humanly, maddeningly, finite. Most of the world lives there these days, and has multiple addresses.

I think of each website as a mansion with multiple doors and windows through which your friends, enemies, clients, and creditors may enter. The biggest mistake people make is to send everyone to their front door, when they could be coming directly into the basement, the bathroom, the bedroom or the kitchen without having to stop, waste everyone's time, and perhaps not find their way to what they need.

I'm a 1or2-click guy. (I try to be... this site doesn't get it done yet). One or two clicks from home page to where you want to go.

I've been fortunate to have been able to design a wide variety of websites, from large educational sites to small sales sites. My current frontier is learning how to customize Wordpress sites. Here are some examples of past work:

J & P Cleaning
Magnetic
VLM
Macna
EEI
Startwrite
WJD

This is a brand new site for one of my first Seattle clients, J and P Cleaning. Jose and his family have a great story to tell, and they have a great business that is now ready to grow. I'm excited to help them make their dream a reality. I took photographs, interviewed them to find out what to write, designed a little logo for them, and put it all together into a website and brochure.

Magnetic Studios home page design

This site was for my good friend and all-time favorite audio engineer, John Fippin. He asked me to handle the branding, including a new logo and photography around the studio. Another designer did a great job creating brochures. Like a lot of sites for busy people in the creative business, this one could use a refresh. Here's the link.

VLM International website

This was the second time I rebranded VLM. The first time, I shifted the colors to purples and greens. The positioning theme I created then was "Come Jam with the Best":

VLM International Trade Show image

That campaign, involving trade show booth, brochures, video, and advertising, (everything but the website) led to a quadrupling of their sales each of the next two years. But in the next 10 years a major downtown in the telecom market transformed VLM from fresh upstart to weary but surviving old timer. So when they brought me back to revitalize the marketing, we held brainstorming meetings to identify what the new authentic brand had become. What emerged was the Benjamin Franklin theme: Versatility with Stability. I recommended browns, creams, and steel blue for the new branding, and refreshed the same logo with the new colors. This time I also designed the website, along with the video, trade show booth, ads, brochures, and CD-ROM mailers. I shot all the photography and video for both projects, and wrote all the copy. Click to see the website directly.

DeDietrich Boilers consumer web page

Macna (Sole U.S. importer of DeDietrich boilers) I still like the energy and branding efforts that Jason Nowland brought to Macna. He did a super job in my view. I was a subcontractor for video, photography and web development, and my role was to whittle down the web copy, design the web user interface, and create the flash animations, and code the site. I also produced a number of video modules that were used in presentations and distributed via CD.

Unfortunately, Macna couldn't quite make it, and closed its doors a few years ago. There's a great lesson for all of us: good marketing does not guarantee a successful business. Perhaps selling imported French boilers in a country that prefers forced air natural gas was never a smart idea. Perhaps the company was undercapitalized, or made staffing mistakes. Whatever the reason, economics killed a cool company with a knowledgeable staff and a great product. Though the site is not live, a replica of it is operating here.

Engineering Excellence page

Engineering Excellence is one of those sites that has way too much copy. (Like this one!) :-) I'm hoping we get to redesign it for them. Less is more! You can see the whole site here. You can also look at the photo shoot I did for them on the slider-chooser here.

StartwriteLLC home page

Startwrite is a simple, inexpensive site created with Apple's iWeb program so that the client could maintain it herself. I shot the photos in a two-hour session at her office, wrote the copy and laid out the site for her. You can see it here.

Why Jesus Died home page

Why Jesus Died was the first site that I worked on when I started venturing into CSS compliant sites. It really hasn't been touched for several years... it just keeps humming along here.