Interesting deconstruct of the upcoming Gawker design. If you watch the video you’ll see how it’s like the new Twitter design in reverse: expanded article on left, scrolling news feed on the right.
New MartinKelley.com designed site:
Michael Oliveras is a long-time union carpenter making the entrepreneurial jump and starting his own business: Mike’s Precision Carpentry. He came to me looking for a webpage to advertise his new enterprise.
It’s a simple design, a typical small-business site of half-a-dozen pages. The color scheme matches his business cards for a bit of branding. Oliveras faced a problem typical for new businesses: a lack of good photos. The work he’s done for many years is not technically his own (per the employment contracts) so for now the pictures are a mix of the few jobs he has done on his own and a few stock images. I’m sure he’ll have a well-rounded portfolio before long and we’ll be able to fill out the site with his own work. In the meantimes, he added a couple of great pictures of him and his family on the “About Us” page to give it that personal touch.
See it live: www.mikes-precision-carpentry.com
Web marketing my MartinKelley.com blog:
A potential client recently came to me with an existing site. It certainly was slick: the homepage featured a Flash animation of telegenic young professionals culled from a stock photo service, psuedo-jazz techno music, and words sweeping in from all sides selling you the company’s service. Unfortunately the page had no useful content, no call-to-action and no Google PageRank. It was an expensive design, but I didn’t need to look at the tracking stats to know no one came this page.
So you’re ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynamic, something that will attract customers and interact with them. Here’s five tips for building a self-marketing website!
New site from MartinKelley.com Design:
Elisabeth is a painter and artist who specializes in original acrylic paintings and giclee prints of nature and South Jersey beach scenes. Her existing site was attractive, but it didn’t have online ordering and she wasn’t able to update it herself.
We put together a features list and then went through a round of concept screenshots which I built in Adobe Fireworks and Photoshop (you can see our work here!). Design in hand, I built a customized Movable Type site. A specialized template allows her to enter information about the each piece: medium, theme, price and the URL to it’s image (most of which are hosted on Flickr). Movable Type pulls these together into various category and individual art pages, with automatically-generated Paypal “Buy” buttons for available pieces. We stressed search-engine visibility so there are many categories and they all cross-link with each painting.
Visit: Elisabeth Olver
A local client from Tabernacle NJ came to me with an interesting project. He’s owned a commercial cleaning company for a number of years and has heard his share of horror stories about the cleaning services clients hired before finding him! This experience led him to write a PDF book about how to hire the right cleaning service. What a great idea and a what a useful book this is for small business owners.
The site’s on a bit of a budget so it’s a simple design, with colors and general look-and-feel borrowed from a site the client likes. Simple editing comes via CushyCMS. When customers click to buy, they are sent to Paypal for the actual transaction and then forwarded to E-Junkie, which provides the automated and integrated PDF download.
Visit the site: Office Manager’s Guide to Hiring the Best Cleaning Service
