Buffalo Community Orchestra Website
When I joined the board of the Buffalo Community Orchestra, they had neither a website nor a coherent brand, and they did very little to draw people to their concerts. I began at the drawing board to create a strong, elegant brand identity. The next step was to find a way to bring in more attendees, which I approached by offering online ticket sales through Eventbrite. Now with a user goal established—buying online tickets—I moved on to the next task: developing a website.
I built the site in WordPress (my first CMS project) using a simple, custom-made theme to help me understand how the back-end and front-end of the platform work together. The site was released with a minimum amount of information needed to begin marketing efforts, and subsequent content has been and is continuing to be added as it is generated.
The website is responsive (mobile-friendly), utilizes newer CSS technologies (like flexbox), and is cross-browser compatible. Take a look at the live site, and if you're in the Buffalo, MN area, why not drop in for a concert sometime?
Crazi Coffee Website
While sipping a cold chai tea at my local coffee shop, I took a look at their website on my phone to learn more about the business. Immediately I knew I could be useful—text boxes were overlapping the logo, and the hours of operation were listed in two places (and the listings were different from each other). The home page was sparce and overall the site was difficult to navigate.
Since that day, I've been working closely with one of the owners to give the entire site a radical makeover. We started by identifying what content needed to be included and how the navigation should be organized, and then I proceeded to sketch out alternative layouts. Once they had chosen a layout, I created a set of eight food- and drink-inspired illustrations to use on the menu pages because they didn't have very many photos and extended their brand colors to a palette of eight, each identifying a different menu category.
Because the website was created in WordPress, I performed the redesign by creating a plugin to add menu-item functionality (allowing the menu to auto-populate with daily specials) and utilized other plugins to modify the CSS. Now the website is responsive (mobile-friendly), utilizes newer web technologies (like CSS flexbox and SVG images), and is cross-browser compatible.
There are still a few details that we're tweaking as we go, but for the most part it's finished. Take a look at the live site, and if you're ever passing through Winsted, MN, I strongly recommend you stop in for a drink—the staff is friendly and the drinks are delicious!