This site is a basic marketing site built on WordPress, with a twist. The client has a number of businesses, and the site aims to include at least a little bit of information about all of them. Features include a logo digitized from a painting on a truck door, custom photography, and full mobile support including clickable phone numbers.
Fransway For Assembly
The client had several requirements for this site: it had to be completed in a matter of days, and it had to appear simple and “flow” well, despite a fairly large amount of content. Fortunately, the client was willing to collaborate fully, and worked hard to supply content and advice in a timely manner. It is based on WordPress. To save time, I chose a slightly older but very popular theme, figuring that most of the bugs would be worked out. The process went smoothly. The site also features custom portrait photography.
Old Newspaper Database Search
This was a really fun pro-bono project we took on in 2003, shortly before a local librarian’s retirement. Judy had spent several decades writing some 87,190 abstracts (single-sentence summaries) of newspaper articles published in Northern Nevada prior to 1900. She also developed a hierarchical indexing vocabulary that she used to tag each article. She was an amazing resource for visiting historians, but when she gave notice, she feared the library might scrap her ancient Apple Mac, and her data along with it. No one else there really knew how to use it. Though fairly consistent in format, her abstracts were scattered across a variety of Hypercard and FileMaker databases of various vintages, going all the way back to FileMaker 1.0. Judy had a portable ZIP drive (remember those?) so we used that to get all the database files onto our system. From there, we exported them as text files, and used Unix text-processing tools (sed, awk, grep, etc.) to finagle them all into a single, massive comma-delimited file. From there, it was an easy matter to write a custom MySQL database and import the records. Finally, we wrote a full-text search interface using PHP, HTML, and CSS. It enables Judy, in her capacity as a museum volunteer, to continue her legacy of supporting local historians in their research efforts. Features include an advanced search interface, sortable result columns, and keyword highlighting. It’s blazing fast, scoring a perfect 100 on Pagespeed Insights. Our hope was that someone would eventually come up with the funding to photograph the pages of these ancient papers, so that the search results could take the reader to the full article. Any takers???
Cafe 345
We built this site for a client who allowed us full creative control. We took photos of the shop’s beautiful chalkboard menus, and used them to create an engaging, animated intro slideshow. The site is a fairly simple one-page design that still manages to convey a sense of the atmosphere and style the cafe is known for. It was built atop a popular WordPress theme for restaurants.
Eleventh Judicial District Court
We built and launched this site shortly after the formation of Nevada’s Eleventh Judicial District in 2015. It features a custom logo, custom interior and exterior photography, a download manager for the court’s preferred collection of legal self-help forms, Google Maps with directions, spam-protected contact forms, and a fully responsive design with many usability features for mobile devices. It is built on Joomla 3.x, and a high-end Joomla theme from a boutique theme shop.
Townhouse Motel
This site helped the client grow from half-full parking lots to early “No Vacancy” signs within a few months. The client was so happy, we have never had to bill them; the checks always arrive early, with hand-written “thank you” notes. The site features custom interior and exterior photography, full-API integration with a third-party booking engine, an advanced Google Maps widget, spam-protected contact form, and integrated review widgets from the top motel rating sites out there. It was built on an understated WordPress theme, with CSS customizations to reflect the hotel’s brand identity.
Royal Peacock Opal Mine
This is currently our highest-traffic site, with about 50,000 unique visitors each year, from all around the world. It features custom photography, custom logo work, and many advanced typography features. There’s an accordion-style FAQ section, and YouTube video widgets strategically placed on the home page. Following its launch in 2010 on Joomla 1.5, it received a Joomla 2.5 migration a few years later, followed by a graphical template refresh and relaunch on Joomla 3.x in 2015.
Custom Irrigation and Electrical Contractors
This site features custom full-frame DSLR and drone photography. There is also a simple product catalog, staff bios, Google Maps with driving directions, contact forms protected by Google Captcha v2, and a streamlined responsive mobile version.
Vision West Realty
We built the first version of this site in 2009. Our work began by exporting a database of property listings from an ancient site based on Microsoft ASP scripts. After some text processing on the resulting CSV, we successfully imported the listings into Joomla 1.5, using the excellent Intellectual Property (IP) real estate component from The Thinkery, a small, Idaho-based software provider. Over the years, the site has seen several updates to new IP releases, along with several migrations between major Joomla releases. It currently runs on Joomla 3.x, and serves approximately 1,200 users each month.
Solid Gold Homes
We built this site in 2013 for a local dealer of Kit West manufactured homes. Kit West’s website at the time was old and difficult to navigate, so we harvested all available media and information from it, and created a custom catalog with useful filters such as a price, number of rooms, square feet, and so on. Our efforts paid off, as the site’s ever-growing traffic levels affirm. Additional features include a video gallery, Google Maps with driving directions, and a contact form protected by Google Captcha v2. It was built on Joomla 2.5, and since migrated to Joomla 3.x.