First impressions are important for anyone. They are vital in web design.
For people not familiar with a company, its website provides that first impression. The website has to load fast, look good and provide key information all in just a few short seconds. At the same time, maintainable and correctly indexed in search engines.
We are two experienced web designers who are working together. We combine our artistic and technical strengths to come up with highly effective websites. Each one is custom designed and we will continue working with the client until it is just right.
Here are a few of our favorite designs. They include some live websites and some that are designs we submitted to a web design competition. We hope you will enjoy seeing them. They represent a broad range of style and technical complexity.
- Napa Valley Orchid Society
This is our most complex website. There is a great deal of dynamic content supported by a MySQL database. There are dozens of pages and hundreds of pictures. Pictures are added easily by changing a simple text file. There is a monthly newsletter that is entered by the newsletter editor. Since there are so many pages and maintenance can occur anywhere on the site, there is an RSS feed that contains its own XSL stylesheet. The visitor sees a nice presentation instead of the raw XML look of so many RSS feeds.
- Orchid Expedition
On a website the use of graphics is complicated by the issue of download time. We try to avoid large graphics and make extensive use of small repeating graphics.
In this design we found just the right balance of file size and visual impact. Visual interest is carried all the way to the bottom of the page.
- Tiffany Conroy
Tiffany is a young actress seeking to develop her career. She needs an attractive website to get people to consider her for parts.
These people haven’t got time to read a lot of verbiage, so we stick to the basics. Pictures of her, what she has done, how to get in contact with her.
- Security Opus
This is a re-branding and redesign of a website we did for this computer security conference. During the months preceding the conference there is quite a bit of maintenance and one of our developers has this work as his first priority. The pages are organized in a modular fashion and changes can be made quickly. There is a form for and a database for registration and payment for sessions and classes. It runs on an Apache server and uses PHP to build page content.
- He's Got High Hopes
A picture is worth a thousand words. In this design, the graphic tells a story of its own. Even before the viewer starts reading, the mood is set and a context is established.
In our design work we pay particular attention to how the site looks in various resolutions and on each of the six different browsers your visitor may be using. We ensure a consistent experience for everyone seeing your website.
- Glitz Magazine
We design for high visual impact. Sometimes a design needs to be 'pixel perfect' to be effective. Getting the page to appear exactly the same on all six of the commonly used browsers was quite a challenge.
We never resort to telling the viewer what browser he should use or that he must install more software to view the website.
