This site promotes a small company in Idaho that installs custom holiday lighting, and stores it during the off-season. It features a classic one-page design, deconstructed logo hero slider, spam-protected contact form, staff bios, and a gallery of work examples. Each season, the contact form generates dozens and dozens of leads for the company. This is a second-generation redesign that followed a change of ownership in 2018. The redesign was conceived, built, and launched in about 10 days.
Elko County Courts
Around 2013, we were approached by some Elko County judges who were impressed with a site we built for the Sixth Judicial District Court here in Winnemucca. They asked us to put together a single website to serve as an information clearinghouse for all eight courts in Elko County, Nevada. It was a labor-intensive project initially, as we worked with a large group of clients to pull together all the media and information needed. After several weeks, we launched on Joomla 2.5. Distributing costs among the various courts helps keep costs low for Elko County taxpayers. We migrated to Joomla 3.x in 2017, and the site serves an impressively high volume of users. It features an advanced download manager that serves up the self-help legal forms preferred by each court, custom logo branding, judge bios, courthouse maps and photos, links to third-party ticket payment gateways, and SSL encryption for a handful of domain names that point to the site.
DFS West Safety Signs
We developed this site around 2011, for a pair of local entrepreneurs who came up with an innovative work-site signage solution for mines and other industrial operations. The ecommerce component was enhanced with custom javascript that allows customers to type signage text, and see how the words would look when printed on the company’s custom signs. Unfortunately, the idea did not really take off, and so the site has not been migrated from its original Joomla 1.5 platform. In order to keep it running, we moved the site to its own virtual server running an older version of Linux.
Belinda Bell Art
We first launched this art portfolio site in 2011. Cost was a factor, so we used the excellent GalleryScript javascript library to build a simple collection of static HTML pages. As time went on, the artist achieved more commercial success, and she wanted a platform she could update herself. After a few false starts with Joomla, we got the formula right with WordPress and a beautifully simple theme developed by Minimal. Since then, Belinda has been able to photograph and upload new work, and even add new gallery sections with very little help, despite the challenges of a slow Internet connection.
Northern Nevada Gold
We built the first version of this site in 2004, using a custom e-commerce platform I wrote from scratch in MySQL, PHP, HTML, CSS, and Javascript. It served ably for six years, allowing an avid metal detecting enthusiast with limited computer experience to sell many thousands of dollars worth of gold nuggets and other mineral specimens found mostly at abandoned, historic mine sites around Northern Nevada. In 2009, I ported the site to Joomla 1.5, after discovering the excellent Hikashop component, which had just achieved its first stable release. A decade later — and several hundred thousand dollars worth of transactions later — the site is still going strong. It has migrated through several templates and Joomla releases, and currently runs on Joomla 3.8, along with the latest release of Hikashop, which has become a leading e-commerce solution for Joomla.
JR Builders
This site uses custom photography and advanced Google Maps techniques to showcase the work of a local building contractor. It also features a catalog component showcasing the builder’s sideline in fine furniture. It began life in 2010 on Joomla 1.5, and was migrated to Joomla 3.x six years later. During the migration, a new template was implemented, as the old one was no longer maintained. Additional features include spam-protected contact forms, mobile-clickable phone numbers, and Google Maps with custom info bubble and printable driving directions.
Humboldt Museum
This site launched with a new, custom logo design, and an extensive catalog of the museum’s attractions, photographed by us and described by museum founder Pansilee Larson. Several years later, we added an online store offering memberships, historical publications, and event tickets. Winnemucca Web Works is proud to donate the hosting and maintenance for this site, and even more proud that, with a little help at times, museum staff have largely been able to add and modify content by themselves. Over the years, the site has migrated from Joomla 1.5 to 2.5 and finally to 3.x. These migrations entailed a full template replacement, along with the replacement of several essential components.
Tilman Hilbish
This site, though dated and due for an update, shows the enduring, high-performance value of a site built solely with static HTML. I built it in 2009, after my artist friend Matthew Tilman Hilbish told me he had worked with another builder for months, but had not achieved his vision of a simple, uncluttered site that would quickly show visitors the various facets of his work. I did some research, and found the GalleryScript javascript library, which seemed to do what Matthew described. The site uses server-side includes to enforce code orthogonality, and the javascript elements were assembled by bash scripts from image filenames. It was completed in a day or two, and has been live for nearly a decade — a good run for any website. We are discussing a possible update to bring the site into the modern era of mobile devices.
Teddy Swecker
I built this portfolio site for a local artist in 2009, using GalleryScript, a javascript library popular at the time. It features a 3D rotating moon logo created with the GiMP, and animated by custom javascript, and style elements borrowed from one of Teddy’s books for children. Several pages feature playful javascript animations written from scratch. It features photographs of Teddy’s paintings taken at local gallery shows, and has a very simple PayPal shopping cart system for those wishing to buy Teddy’s books or paintings.
Great Basin Arts & Entertainment
This site was originally built on WordPress 2, by Bill Sims, director of GBAE, a non-profit aimed at bringing quality musical entertainment to Winnemucca. Around 2010, I migrated the site to my hosting platform, added a direct email system built atop PHP-List, and have donated hosting and maintenance ever since. The site’s aging template required several minor surgeries to keep it running on more modern versions of WordPress. So, in 2019, I convinced Bill to let me migrate the whole site to a more modern template. To ensure our new template provider would never go out of business or loose interest, I sellected WordPress 5’s built-in “TwentySeventeen” theme, which was more than up to the task of recreating Bill’s original website vision with good mobile device support and great speed. Oh, and I also added a simple online ticket sales system based on Event Tickets from Modern Tribe, and a new “Past Performances” page that presents historic show information in a succinct and aesthetic way.