Classic Hardwood Floors was in a common position: the company had a homemade website which was fine when the company was just getting going, but after several years of growth, the site looked a bit amateur for the caliber of work the company performs.

The goal for the site was of course to show how beautiful hardwood floors looked, achieved through the company’s own project photos, as well as several carefully chosen stock photos. Additionally, the owner would like to start blogging about his industry and projects, which is a great way to build stronger search engine results, and provide a more informative website at the same time. Having the site built in WordPress of course makes blogging on the site very easy.

Jamie Peha and Anne Nisbet have a radio show called “TableTalk” that airs once per month locally in Seattle. The focus is on wine and food: home cooking, restaurants, and foodie events in the Seattle area.

The site primarily is a vehicle for three blogs: one about home cooking, one about events, and one a sort of catch all foodie blog. It would have been quite possible to mash these up into one blog, but we decided to provide the author of each with a slot on the homepage by using a tabbed interface.

In addition to the blogging essentials, the site uses an event manager plugin which I customized to display the information the hosts wanted.

Mistral-Kitchen is a fine dining restaurant in Seattle. The feel of the restaurant is distinctly modern, having been designed by an architect. The owner wanted the website to feel modern and clean, yet dark and moody.

The site is built on WordPress, with a custom back end allowing restaurant staff to easily be able to update menu items.

Belle Femme is an independent salon offering organic skin care in a luxuriant atmosphere. The owner wanted a site that offered a feeling of European luxury and abundance.

The salon also sells jewelry, and the new website offers rich detail for each piece, as well as a way to cross reference other pieces of jewelry that feature the same semi-precious stones.

This was an interesting one!

Having designed an individual restaurant site for Serafina and Cicchetti separately, both under the same ownership and management, the owner now wanted an “umbrella” to wrap the two sites together. This was useful especially given that much of the information, such as contact info, is shared between the two restaurants.

I opted for a design that would allow the branding information to stay fixed at the top of each page, not scrolling out of view on longer pages. To achieve this, I implemented a custom scrollbar, allowing only the content area of longer pages to scroll. You have to see it in action to appreciate this function (Note: if you have a large monitor, you might need to size your monitor down to initialize the scrollbars).

There is also a persistent navigation menu that is available on every page of the umbrella site, Serafina’s site, and Cicchetti’s site, while the two restaurants each have their own navigation menu as well. The idea with this was to make it styled simply (a black vertical bar with white text), both so it would create good contrast with the other sites, yet not clash.

Mixed Greens is run by two serious photographers and foodies, and they are competing with some pretty sophisticated websites for attention on the internet. There old format wasn’t cutting it, so they asked me to redesign it.

We kept enough flavor from the old design (same logo and masthead, white background, bright green links) to make sure their existing readership would not be overly shocked by the new layout. However, we added some features that simply did not exist before.

Previously, the website had a typical blog structure, where the 10 most recent stories simply chained up on the homepage, creating a very long page, and access to only 10 of hundreds of articles the owners have written on local, sustainable food. The new design creates an engaging way to present dense amounts of information as is typical of newspaper and magazine websites: there is a short teaser and thumbnail for many of the stories, with a headline for dozens of others. This allows access to 39 stories on the homepage, while still not feeling visually overwhelming.

The new site also features a slick photo gallery to show off their work. The site owners have the ability to upload their own photos to the gallery. Since this is accomplished with WordPress, they have no fear of “breaking” the layout.

Cicchetti is the sibling restaurant to Serafina, whose website I also designed. The owner wanted a very different feel for this restaurant, as it is a more casual yet modern style of establishment.

Cicchetti’s site features striking photography which expands to fill the background of each page, no matter the size of the viewer’s monitor. The branding at the top is fixed in place by implementing a scrollbar to allow only the content to be scrolled out of view.

Fred Arcala is partner in a Seattle law firm that specializes in immigration law. He wanted a site that had iconic American motifs, yet still appeared professional. I designed a masthead with the Statue of Liberty, and infused the palette of the site with blues and burgundies.

Fred also wanted to be able to add content himself, especially to add informative articles in the form of Frequently Asked Questions, and to be able to create links to sites he found that would be useful for his clients. I set up the site on WordPress, making it very easy for Fred to add his own content.

This was the second project I completed for Seattle-based author and chef Nicole Aloni. The first was her professional homepage, but after we finished it she felt like her new book, A Conscious Feast, needed its own identity.

The site I built for her is a richly featured WordPress blog. It has a custom mechanism for organizing the hundreds of recipes she’s posted, a slideshow on the homepage to serve as a teaser for recent stories, subscription to receive blog updates via email, and a custom “print this recipe” feature.

Yoram Bauman, the world’s first and only Stand-Up Economist, had a challenge for me: could I help him condense the information from three websites into one? And could it also look appropriate for both a comedian and an Econ professor?

Yoram had been juggling lots of information between three different websites, and he wanted to make his life easier. He also wanted something that had enough personality to share his comic side, while remaining serious enough to support his often complex insights into economics. Oh, and he also wanted to start blogging. Stand-Up Economist: The Website (Version 2) was born.