Why would this be leading to a punch line? Because most web designers and graphic designers spend 110% of their time and energy working on other people’s projects. Anne Doyle has a strong portfolio of work and beautiful aesthetic sensibility. When she asked me to work on her website I was truly flattered. We built a site that shows er clarity, her sesigns, even some TV adverts that she produced. Enjoy!
http://www.adesigngraphics.com/
Designer: Anne Doyle
This mini-project was a request for updates to an existing site. It is always a risk to take these jobs as opening someone else’s code up for edit is brave, optimistic and risky. But site owners need updates when they need them and the original designer asked me to step in. I was just thrilled to go from ‘log-on’ to ‘done’ in an hour, adding a few new photos and descriptions to the site.
http://www.maplegrovebedandbreakfast.com/
Site Build: This is what we would call ‘Maintenance’
Design: Paris Design Studio
Arden Sugarman in a great vocal teacher. She coaches developing teens and adults who are serious about their singing. She is also a great writer, so the content of her first site did a good job of explaining who she is and what she does.
SEO: The biggest issue with SEO on her existing site was co-locating on another domain name. We moved the site to its own hosting. When we set up the new site, we paid attention to the words we put into the tags and the text.
Updates: We set up the new site in WordPress, which gives Arden the ability to add and change pages, and to upload her media items.
Private Pages: We set up a separate WordPress site for Students only.
Site Design & Development: Abigail Gorton Websites
Kristina Lentz is a great bodyworker. Her web challenge was that her site not updateable by her – its design and content were both stuck in 2004. My web challenge was to come up with a design that would complement both her pink and orange logo and her bubbly personality. We built her new site in WordPress which means she can make updates herself and we found a great theme to complement her logo and her overall business persona.
We turned this site around fast – Kristina approved the colors on Monday Nov 29 and we launched on Monday December 9. The fun part for me was on launch day – as I was showing Kristina how to make updates she was able to change every piece of text that had been bugging her for months – if not years.
Site Design & Development: Abigail Gorton Websites
Sarah McMoyler is the childbirth educator of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her classes deliver the information and the panache that high-achieving expectant parents are looking for. When we met Sarah her site was visually great and it contained most of the right information, but the structure, functionality and navigation were just not working for her or her clients. We rebuilt the site map and menu structure. We moved some of the information around and res-structured the site.
New site born delivered on 12/6/10, 19 inches 19 pages, 7.5 pounds 7 sections.
Site Development: Abigail Gorton Websites
Sundance Travel website
Sundance Travel is a full service agency located in Marin County, California. Travel consulting services to discerning deluxe/luxury clients, with a specialization in travel with 4-legged friends.
The questions around a new site are always going to be ‘how soon, how big, for what?”. Every site has a budget. Some businesses need their site to be ‘Up, Already!’. This is a 4-page site. We received the image files from the designer on Monday 11/15 and we launched the site on Tuesday 11/ 23. Pretty good!
http://www.adesigngraphics.com
Site Development: Abigail Gorton Websites
Site Design: Anne Doyle
Many of us have encountered the sales tool ACT! at some point in our working lives. This site is for a company who help other companies to install, integrate, learn and use the ACT! product. The consultants work throughout the Bay Area and they need potential clients to find them through web searches.
We focused in SEO and we are continuing to refine it after launch, as we believe it needs to be a combination of onsite and offsite work.
http://www.activebizsystems.com/index.html
Site Design and Build : Abigail Gorton Websites
Waking up to find your site covered in malware feels mighty similar to finding nits on your kid. Major ‘Euuuuch!’. Both situations bring an immediate need to ”Drop everything, already and DEAL with it.” Even procrastinators need to move fast on nits or malware.
Both events can bring out the desire to wallow around in various stages of grief, but both blights call for immediate action in the middle of emotion
| Emotion | Nits | Malware |
| Denial | No, it’s not really!… Maybe there is just one?… Maybe it’s a boy?… Maybe it’s a gay boy nit, all on his own! | That sure is an ugly graphic telling people to stay away from my site…Maybe if I hit refresh it will go away? Heck, it’s not showing up in IE! What does Firefox know anyway? |
| Anger | It’s that stinkin’ **** kid she caught it from! Why do they have to be in our school anyway? | Who DID this to me?!? What did I do to them? I bet I can track them down if I try! |
| Guilt | I should have braided their hair every day. I should have kept it cut shorter. I should have sprayed them with tea tree oil/ | I should have read those emails. I should have applied those upgrades. I never should have sent that stuff in email… |
| Bargaining | If I just give the kid a really good bath, maybe that will get rid of them? If I throw out all that clutter maybe that will do it? If I clean under the bed every week they’ll never come back | I know, I’ll call the hosting company. It’s on THEIR servers! I think they should clean it up for me! |
| Depression | Oh this is going to cost so much money and be so much work and it is such a loss of face… | Oh this is going to cost so much money and be so much work and it is such a loss of face… |
| Resignation | OMG! 24 hours to wash & fold every item of clothing in the house, pick up and quarantine every soft toy and vacuum every floor multiple times. 24 miserable, unavoidable, lonely, consecutive hours. OMG! | Aargh! Send the site off to the professional site-scrubbers or rebuild it from scratch on a new server. Rebuild.it.from.scratch… Figure.out.how.to.remove.malware… Figure.out.point.of.entry… Block.it.forever… |
| Expense | I love the Nit Pixies of San Rafael, they call themselves a Mom’s best friend and they may be ‘cheap at twice the price’ but they are still seriously COSTLY! | You mean, I need to pay someone to clean this up or replace it? And I need to do it right now? |
Seriously though, I have had 2 new clients come to me with malware in the last couple of months. Just like nits, malware can be quarantined, removed and blocked. And just like your house will be truly deep cleaned and de-cluttered after a nit attack, so will your site and your files be cleansed with all the old trash moved out. Gleaming, perfect and locked down against all intruders. Unfortunately, the similarity ends there. Nits are WAY more likely to come back, and nits are way more likely to come from your friends than from some random hacker.
Goodin MacBride is a well established San Francisco law firm whose attorneys specialize in California Regulatory law, and also in Qui Tam and Civil Law. The new site contains well over 100 pages, with about 60 of them focusing on each of the niches of business that this firm addresses. We used slightly different color coding for the Regulatory Law, Civil Law and About sections of the site.
A huge goal in the project was SEO. We made the site as big as it is so that each niche of their law practice would have its own page and its own chance to get indexed. We are currently tweaking the code and contents of those pages to push them further up in the rankings.
http://www.goodinmacbride.com/
Site Development: Abigail Gorton Websites
Site Design: Quinne Design
Jerry Jacobs Design is a successful interior design business operating in San Francisco, London and Mexico. When I met Jerry last year, he already had a website, but it was getting on in years and he was looking for a complete refresh. He also already had great organic Search Engine Optimization so I was in the unusual position of needing to replace a site that ranked #1 on Google for ‘Interior Designer San Francisco’. Umm, do you know how many interior designers there are in San Francisco? So how hard that might be to maintain? Quite a challenge!
The original site is shown here. The concept of small photos used to navigate within a gallery work for some people and I have used it myself on other sites, but Jerry was ‘done, already!’ with it. He needed navigation to be clearer – to show where you were within a gallery, where the gallery was within the overall site and how to click around between and within galleries using large and small arrows.
So we mapped out a left side menu system and information architecture which did that. We had 2 big goals on this site – to make navigation within the galleries clearer and to maintain the SEO. There are two directory sites that appear above him but he is still the first individual designer to come up on Google.
www.JerryJacobsDesign.com
Website design and development: Abigail Gorton Websites
