We had a great time creating a website for Josh Levs’s book “All In” last year. A noted author, keynote speaker, and consultant, Josh’s business needs changed, and so he asked us for some new features and functions, and a new homepage look, highlighting his speaking engagements. We kept the same branding and generally look and feel, but added videos, new features, and a brand new layout to the site.
Check out the Project in our Portfolio!
See the website at JoshLevs.com.
Sport Risk Consulting does speaking engagements, waiver & release consulting, and writes books and articles related to waivers and releases of liability in sports. Sportwaiver.com is their blog and website which contains years of articles and blog posts about waiver and release cases and other sports law related items. They needed a news style website to promote their consulting & books.
Team Care PT is a physical therapy practice in the Raleigh, NC area. Their old website was dated and hard to update, so they came to us for something fresh and modern, that reflected the style of the practice.
We created a website for Beth Kemper, a pelvic physical therapist in Decatur, GA, many years ago, in the days before the ubiquitousness of mobile devices. Today every website we build is mobile friendly and responsive, but not so in the ‘old days’! Beth still loved the look of her website–the design had stood the test of time– but it needed to work better for today’s devices. So we built Beth a new site, using all the most recent coding standards, but keeping her signature look and feel.
Some great websites from 2016…
Annie Oakley Shooters a women’s clay shooting club in the Atlanta, GA area. The mission of the Annie Oakley Shooters is to enhance awareness and enjoyment of women’s clay shooting sports by offering fellowship, quality instruction and opportunity for the sport. We created a new website reflecting their branding that was easy to update and allowed them to showcase their events.
Write By The Water is the website for a yearly writers’ retreat. The web site features strong illustrations, in a ‘one-page’ style website.
Adam Properties is an Atlanta office/warehouse properties investment, leasing and property management company. Their website showcases their available properties with a little bit of a retro vibe.
Megan Tarshis is a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) and psychotherapist in the intown Atlanta area. She wanted a minimalist & soft website, with strong images and lots of white space for her new practice.
Find The Beloved is a courses website built based on the Sensai product from Woo.
We developed the peacock logo and branding based on the idea of traditional Indian woodcut prints.
With some impressive words for the new book by people like Maria Shriver and Bob Sagat, we highlight the praise for the book both in the front page image, and also in rotating testimonials. Although it is a relatively simple 1+ page website, all the key information is contained on the main page, easily scrolled to. Multiple links promote the purchase of the book, which will automatically change from “Preorder” text to “Purchase” text on the book release date later this year. Responsive site takes advantage of large and small screen sizes.
The Shyamdas Foundation is a website dedicated to preserving the works of Shyamdas (1953-2013), who was a pioneer in bringing Indian devotional and yogic traditions to the West. They had an existing website which was used as a base, but over the course of several projects we have improved the functionality and mobile friendliness of the original site. We also added archives functionality, both storage (cloud storage utilizing Amazon AWS to store a large number of video, audio, text files and photos) as well as forms and integration to allow members to submit their own archive items, to grow the archive. Additional features include integrated fundraising functionality (using Ignition Deck) and membership features.
Shyamdas Home Page
The Fitwit Foundation, based in Atlanta, GA, is a non-profit dedicated to offering free fitness and character development programs to teens. The foundation wanted a new website to reflect their brand, showcasing the work they do, and inspiring others to donate and get involved. Working closely with the director to realize her vision, the website is now bright, cheerful and interesting, allows for easy online donations, and features the kids in a starring role.
Lifeworks Consulting, in Northern Virginia, came to us with a typical small business problem. They thought they could just pull together a website usually a standard WordPress template, and weren’t happy with the results. They wanted something more professional that really represented their business. They had another common problem of service professionals: no real “branding” on which to base a website. So we started by working on the branding, the look and feel, and how to really explain the service and engage potential customers. Although this is a relatively simple site, it is effective, professional, and reflects the business.
Full homepage.
The Fitwit Foundation, based in Atlanta, GA, is a non-profit dedicated to offering free fitness and character development programs to teens. The foundation wanted a new website to reflect their brand, showcasing the work they do, and inspiring others to donate and get involved. Working closely with the director to realize her vision, the website is now bright, cheerful and interesting, allows for easy online donations, and features the kids in a starring role.
This project, for New England musician and therapist Adam Bauer, included design of a new website with a focus on promoting his new album, and also multiple custom mailing list templates (Mailchimp).
Gabrielli LaChiara is a Massachusetts based counselor and teacher specializing in healing and transformation for both individuals and institutions. The features of Gabrielli’s new website include event booking and management using Event Espresso, and a customized Buddypress installation to provide social networking and community features and allow her to serve custom on-line content for students of the various classes that she teaches. Buddypress Group features are used to serve the right content to the right students. Site is fully responsive and mobile friendly.
As part of the website design, we also provided a logo.
Your Open Graph tags determine how your website looks when people post a link to it on Facebook. It also determines how the site looks when you display your blog/news posts on your Facebook page. I have mixed feelings on whether a Facebook page for your business is really worth it (hint, it totally depends on what type of business you have) but as part of the redesign I set up a new Facebook page for Dabbled Studios, and blog posts here will show up there. So when they show up, they’d better look good, right?
If you want to be sure how your site pages/posts look to Facebook, you can use the Facebook Debugger. Just paste the URL to a post, or a page, and click the Debug button, and you can see your site the way facebook sees it. If you have a WordPress site, it generally won’t look too bad by default, by I wanted to make sure my featured image was the image shown (rather than whatever FB picks!), and generally make sure my posts and pages looked how I wanted them to look.
As part of the site redesign, I pulled all my Open Graph settings into a function. The code I used is commented below. You can put this in your functions.php file, or in a plugin, if you’d like to use it.
function insert_opengraph() {
$current_category = single_cat_title("", false); //get the category name if it's a category page
global $post;
setup_postdata( $post ); //get the excerpt function to work outside the loop
echo '<meta property="og:site_name" content="'. get_bloginfo ( 'name' ).'"/>'; //set the site name
//treat the front page, post/pages, and archive pages differently
if ( is_front_page( ) ) {
$excerpt = get_bloginfo('description');
echo '<meta property="og:title" content="' . get_bloginfo ( 'name' ) . '"/>';
echo '<meta property="og:type" content="website"/>';
} elseif (is_singular() ){
$excerpt = get_the_excerpt();
echo '<meta property="og:title" content="' . get_the_title() . '"/>';
echo '<meta property="og:type" content="article"/>';
echo '<meta property="og:url" content="' . get_permalink() . '"/>';
} else {
$excerpt = get_bloginfo('description');
echo '<meta property="og:title" content="' . $current_category . ' Archives"/>';
echo '<meta property="og:type" content="website"/>';
}
echo '<meta property="og:description" content="'.$excerpt.'"/>';
//get the featured image, and if not, then get a default image. be sure to set the url.
if(!has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID )) {
$default_image="http://mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/logo3.png"; //default
echo '<meta property="og:image" content="' . $default_image . '"/>';
}
else{
$thumbnail_src = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ), 'medium' );
echo '<meta property="og:image" content="' . esc_attr( $thumbnail_src[0] ) . '"/>';
}
}
add_action( 'wp_head', 'insert_opengraph', 5 ); //insert into the header
One of the first things we wanted to do with the redesign was fix up the logo.
The old logo had basically just evolved from a pure text logo; it wasn’t something that I’d spent a great deal of time on.
Some old iterations:
So the new logo needed to look a little more intentional, plus it needed to fit with the new website. I wanted to keep the dandelion, but I’d never really liked the way it was just stuck in the middle of the words. The other thing I wanted to do was to have a small logo that could sit at the top of the website, and this one did not really work well at a small format.
I’m still playing around with this, as I need to work a bit on how it functions in pure black and white, but rather than let perfect be the enemy of good, it’s being released to the wild with this redesign launch. I like that the box (shown in a sea blue here) can be done in any color in my website palette.
So by itself (the transparent background is indicated by the grey and white check):
With the name:
Wide Full text version:
Black and White only version:
What do they say about the cobbler’s kids having no shoes? Well, the Dabbled Studios website was looking a bit dated, and wasn’t as easy to keep updated as it should have been, so it was definitely time to squeeze in an upgrade and a bit of a facelift.
Some requirements:
In the next several posts, I’ll talk about what we’ve done, and where we still need to go.
The Flint Area Consolidated Housing Authority wanted a website that was welcoming, clean, and easy to use for both current and potential residents.
Shannon Goines is a talented Atlanta artist, whose work can be found in many homes and galleries around Atlanta and the South. Shannon wanted a portfolio website that would professionally showcase her style, with a focus on her paintings.
Dharma Boutique is an online shop specializing in fair trade goods from Asia. The shop was built on the BigCommerce E-commerce platform, and features a rotating slideshow, plus an extensively categorized selection of merchandise
2013 was a busy year, and I neglected to post some of the cool projects that were completed in 2013! Without further ado, flip through this slideshow to see a few of them:
For more on each of these:
North Georgia's Largest Volume Spirits Retailer gets a new website
We took advantage of the design and templates built for Beverage Superstore of Grayson, to build a similar modern look for Beverage Superstore‘s 2 main locations in Suwanee. Features include an online calculator for determining the amount of beverages needed for a party, integrated Facebook feed, and rotating featured specials banner.
MountNFrame : Migrate a dated e-commerce site to a new platform and look.
A Vail frame shop offers Posters and Prints online for both their customers, and the public at large. Their old site was clunky and dated, and this project updated their site to a new platform, keeping their current logo, but updating the look and feel to a more modern vibe.
Beverage Superstore was opening a sister location in Grayson, Georgia, and needed a new website. Although the original locations had a website, it was dated and difficult to maintain. We took this opportunity to update the branding, design a new website that was as fresh as the new store. Features a rotating front page specials section, as well as Facebook page news integration prominently displayed on the front page. New branding was extended to a new mailing list (using Mailchimp) as well.
Red Rocket Farm is the main site for Jason Thomas, artist, creator and animator of Cradle Me Sky, and author of Free Drawings for Total Strangers. This site features Jason’s wonderful artwork, rotating front page billboards highlighting content throughout the site, and a Cradle Me Sky subsite. Our first stage of this project was simply to build the Cradle Me Sky site. Phase 2 was just completed, adding the main Red Rocket Farm site, as well as a webcomic-like section for Free Drawings for total strangers, and the Farm Blog.
Seattle urban farm food blogger Janelle is known to wield knives, pitchforks & the occasional martini.
Yes You Can Dance is a Pittsburg based non-profit sharing the joys of dance with seniors as well as special needs teens and adults. The website is fun and lively, with a style evocative of the past of ballroom dance. Features: event registration and management, members only functionality, focus on ease of use and accessibility.
Logo Design:
Website for YesYouCanDance.org
Kimball Bates Photography wanted a portfolio site as unique as the photographer’s style. The portfolio site is clean and spare, focusing on the photos themselves, and the branded ‘blog’ section (MegaPixel Dust) gives a more casual view of her work and style. The portfolio section is easily expandable and updatable, so the content can stay fresh and current.
The blog:
