California History Center

Small Non-profit Organization

Site is hosted and is a sub-menu item of a larger community college website. As such, it needs to conform to the style, color pallet, look and feel of the rest of the site.

At the same time the mission of the center is to share the archives with the public. The challenge is to make content-rich pages within the constraints of the larger organization's image.

The center's 45 year run of print magazines was digitized and put online in easily readable and downloadable form.

The audio and video part of the archives is in the process of being digitized and made available to the public. The large media files are hosted on YouTube and linked to the site. This increases the potential audience, improved download speeds worldwide, and bypasses the memory limitations on the campus site.

While the content management system used by the campus is a bit difficult to use, the campus IT department does supply excellent technical assistance. After a few months of learning adding content to the site is reasonable.

Further content development and digitization is the main area of support at present.

Friends of the Palo Alto Library

Small Non-profit Organization

Greenfield HTML/CSS site with W3.CSS framework.

Existing organization official website was in WordPress and logistically unable to manage a high volume of high resolution pictures that changed monthly.

The need for merchandise pictures was solved using minimal well-formatted HTML with an easy to change menu structure.

Long term identity color used since the days of print was kept. Customers only really care about the picture content.

The long download time for the desired high-resolution pictures was mitigated by splitting content into many separate pages by subject.

Available merchandise is unknown until a few days before the monthly sale. A rapid site refresh process was developed.

After over a year's operation the site has developed a loyal customer following. The organization now finds it an integral part of its operations and looking to expand it to the next level.

South Bay Yacht Club

Small Non-profit Organization

Customer has a nice existing website using GoDaddy's Website Builder tool.

The website is satisfactory, gets a lot of traffic, and meets member's expectations. Club leadership needed someone to handle the technical issues, update the monthly newsletter and add more content as needed.

While easy to use, the tool does have limitations that come up when more advanced (and larger) content is desired. We have been able to work around some of the issues by using straight HTML that the tool inserts at the desired location. It is a bit clunky, especially for other users, but it does (mostly) work.

Several people modify the site so keeping the tool is best advised.

Future work on this site will be in making the club's 124 years of historical archives available to the public.

Accurate Control & Electrification

Small Business

Greenfield HTML/CSS site with W3.CSS framework.

Absorbed another brand name seamlessly into website while keeping original identity.

Manufacturers representative firm with a large number of OEM lines not uniformly available throughout it's territory. Created page for each territory state.

What exact products are available to be represented is not intuitively obvious or easy to discern from the OEM websites. Even the salespeople were confused. Explicitly enumerated each allowable OEM product by catageory.

Written product names are not standardized across OEMs. Illustrations of every product is used to greatly speed up selection/identification by customers, especially for enclosures.

Large OEM websites rarely have information designers need in one location. Gather as much OEM information on one page to facilitate the customer decision process.

There is no budget for professional stock photographs. Attractive high-quality free-with-attribution photos were utilized. Enhanced the professionalism by making the picture identification and relationship to the business an integral part of the attribution text. Customers said they enjoyed learning more about where the products were used while being inspired by the lush imagery.

The more difficult to explain system integration and services were demonstrated using custom diagrams as navigation/selection tools.

Firm is acquiring an important new line in 2024. Will be illustrating the value of that line to customers with some new pages.

Hera School

Small Non-profit Organization

Customer was a new organization that needed a website quickly to establish credibility and get the message out.

Initial website was created from a short initial pitch deck and some quick guidance from the customer in two weeks, just in time for a important outreach meeting.

Our mandate was to have the website emphasize female and minority student inclusion. A significant portion of the effort was in finding imagery that was in support of this mission.

Website uses clean HTML with two simultaneous frameworks, W3.CSS and Bootstrap, utilizing the strengths of each.

However, the customer decided to use a simpler approach using the open-source Quill rich-text editor and less content shortly after the site roll-out to create their current website.