Category Archive

I built this in a couple of days for my old friend and long-time client David Toll. David wrote about Nevada for 50 years, and in his final year of life, published an anthology of his best writing. The site was a success, and the first two printings sold out in a matter of weeks.

This simple marketing site features custom words and images, along with room booking forms that integrate with a third-party booking engine provider.

This straight-ahead marketing site features great photos of spectacular truck and car wreck recoveries and clean-ups. We built it in WordPress for a family-owned and operated local business serving Northern Nevada for more than 50 years.

Another website “rescue” mission, this entailed rebuilding a well-established site that suffered from slow performance, technical glitches, and bit-rot after a series of partially realized theme and host migrations in the past. Other issues included an overly complex taxonomy structure, a labor-intensive ad placement system, and a growing “bounce rate” that was sending traffic growth, though still substantial, in the wrong direction. After researching and purchasing a highly regarded WordPress “directory site” theme, we set about migrating the  data. The crux entailed writing PHP scripts to extract serialized data objects from the old database, reformatting them with Unix text processing tools, and importing them via the new theme’s WP All Import profile. After several false starts, we were able to avoid the onus of manually recreating the site’s thousand-plus listings. I’ll add that this site was a real pleasure to work on! Throughout the process, I was constantly entertained by the site creators’ fantastic photos and witty, literary style of writing. This was definitely one of my most enjoyable WordPress projects so far!

This project entailed taking over maintenance of a very active e-commerce site for an arboretum in Flagstaff, Arizona. The site handles a truly impressive volume of event ticket sales. The site software had not been updated in nearly a year, exposing it to many potential security issues. The original site builders warned that updating could break the site, though, and the Arboretum feared having to spend a lot of money to fix things if something went wrong. Additionally, much of the content was out-of-date. Our first step was to strike a copy of the site on one of our dedicated servers. There, we brought all software components up-to-date and tested thoroughly before duplicating the same changes on the live site. Next followed an extensive round of content updates. We were especially proud of replacing a convoluted series of “opening hours” wordings with a simple seasonal table, using hand-coded responsive html/css. Finally, we were asked to take over hosting and maintenance, and permanently moved the site to one of our servers. There, our patented “belt, suspenders, and parachute” backups allowed us to enable automatic updates, with the assurance that if an update were to break something, we could easily restore the site to a working version and manually resolve any issues preventing forward migration. The Arboretum staff have been a delight to work with, and I hope to make it down to Flagstaff at some point to check the place out it person. From the website, it looks very nice!

This was another project for David Toll’s “NevadaWeb” family of websites devoted to our home state. The design is minimalist, with an uncluttered look that highlight’s David’s great content. For anyone unfamiliar with Mr. Toll’s work, he is a veteran Nevada newspaper editor who has authored many books, including most recently a fascinating biography of Joe Conforte. Most of the development time involved fine-tuning the fonts for maximum readability and simplicity on screens of all sizes. As always, it was a pleasure and an honor to work with Mr. Toll on this project.

This VERY simple site was traded for a hat. It uses a free WordPress theme, and leans on Facebook to supply the calendar of events. Other features include custom photography, a spiffy contact form leveraging G-Suite SMTP with OAuth authentication, a quick custom logo based on the cool “Rancho” font, and a custom-coded dynamic copyright date footer function. All in all, a very basic, entry-level marketing site that still manages to look professional and provide useful information.

This build went quick and easy, since content could be taken from the client’s old websites, which were consolidated to save the client money. I used Avada, the most popular WordPress theme of all time. I was impressed by how easily and quickly the site came together! If you’re looking for a high-quality marketing website for a small, local business of any kind, ask us about Avada!